SOURCE: Jacobus, Mary. “‘The Tragic Super-Tragic’ and Salisbury Plain.” In Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's “Lyrical Ballads” (1798), pp. 133-58. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

[In the following excerpt, Jacobus provides a detailed reading of Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain, noting that the poem is pivotal because it signals the poet's growing awareness of the realities of human suffering.]

Wordsworth's earliest attempts to portray suffering are clumsy and overstated, ‘The tragic super-tragic’, in contrast to the effective understatement of his later narrative poetry:

Then common death was none, common mishap,
But matter for this humour everywhere,
The tragic super-tragic, else left short.
Then, if a Widow, staggering with the blow
Of her distress, was known to have made her way
To the cold grave in which her Husband slept,
One night, or haply more than one, through pain
Or half-insensate impotence of mind
The fact was caught at greedily, and there
She was a Visitant the whole year through,
Wetting the turf with never-ending tears,
And all the storms of Heaven must beat on her.(1)

Long before he wrote these lines, he had adopted a technique of moving restraint. With ‘The Ruined Cottage’, the drama of distress sketched in The Prelude becomes a tragedy of disrupted relationships, humane in its assumptions yet transfigured by the Wordsworthian imagination. His starting-point, while still at school in the late 1780s, had been ‘The notions and the images of books’²—notions and images like those of Joseph Warton's ‘Ode to Fancy’:

Let us with silent footsteps go
To charnels and the house of woe,
To Gothic churches, vaults, and tombs,
Where each sad night some virgin comes,
With throbbing breast, and faded cheek,
Her promis'd bridegroom's urn to seek;
Or to some Abby's mould'ring tow'rs,
Where, to avoid cold wint'ry show'rs,
The naked beggar shivering lies,
While whistling tempests round her rise,
And trembles lest the tottering wall
Should on her sleeping infants fall.(3)

The stock figures of grief and destitution, with their landscape of distress—ruins and inclement weather—reappear in Wordsworth's early poetry as he too pays lip-service to contemporary sensibility or exploits suffering for the purposes of humanitarian protest. Out of such writing comes his first major narrative poem. Salisbury Plain,⁴ originally based on the story of the Female Vagrant, attempts to recast these pathetic episodes as a sustained attack on the conditions of the dispossessed, the victims of war, and the social outlaw. Not yet as profound or as meditative as ‘The Ruined Cottage’, Salisbury Plain nonetheless marks Wordsworth's commitment to the realities of human suffering.

I. PATHOS AND PROTEST POETRY

Wordsworth's self-parody in The Prelude goes on to allude specifically to his earliest surviving study of suffering, the episode of the female beggar incorporated into An Evening Walk. What he laughs at is the ‘wild obliquity’ by which a drooping foxglove can conjure up a spectacle of distress—a kind of pathetic fallacy in reverse:

                                                                                                    behold!
If such a sight were seen, would Fancy bring
Some Vagrant thither with her Babes, and seat her
Upon the turf beneath the stately Flower
Drooping in sympathy, and making so
A melancholy Crest above the head
Of the lorn Creature, while her Little-Ones,
All unconcerned with her unhappy plight,
Were sporting with the purple cups that lay
Scatter'd upon the ground.(5)

In An Evening Walk, the female beggar is introduced by way of contrast with a female swan, and (as The Prelude implies) she is there to satisfy contemporary sensibility rather than the demands of the poem itself:

          Fair swan! by all a mother's joys caress'd,
Haply some wretch has ey'd, and call'd thee bless'd;
Who faint, and beat by summer's breathless ray,
Hath dragg'd her babes along this weary way …(6)

Wordsworth's self-parody recollects in particular the beggar's pathetic attempts to amuse her children—

Pleas'd thro' the dusk their breaking smiles to view,
Oft has she taught them on her lap to play
Delighted, with the glow-worm's harmless ray
Toss'd light from hand to hand; while on the ground
Small circles of green radiance gleam around.(7)

—a passage that is significantly found in rough drafts going back to 1788, there coloured by the pathos of the pseudoantiquarian ballad, Hardyknute:

                                                                      Much she wish'd to lay
Her cheek to its cold cheek
But wet and chill the tears that from her eyes
Flow'd like a stream.
Unconscious of her woes another babe
Sat by, and smiled, delighted—for it held
A glow worm in its little hand,
At which it looked
Delighted: while it toss'd it to and fro
It gazed the stars that on the brow of night
Dim twinkl'd
                                        I could a tale unfold
Of that unhappy family, more sad,
More piteous in its circumstance
When the storm howl'd and beat the rain of night
And Hardyknute beheld his castle wall
Gloomy and dark; nor knew the woeful woe
Of his unhappy daughter Fairly Fair—(8)

As it happens, the draft offers us not a piteous tale, but a poignant detail—the contrast between the mother's grief and the child's impervious gaiety—of a kind that will surface a decade later in ‘The Mad Mother’. For the next few years, however, Wordsworth's portrayal of suffering is more often dictated by the conventions of the time, whether pathetic, sensational, or humanitarian. Not until Salisbury Plain is there any real insight into the nature of destitution and unbalance.

Prelude Book VIII and Warton's ‘Ode to Fancy’ invoke the two chief stereotypes of the poetry of suffering—on the one hand, the ‘Widow, staggering with the blow / Of her distress’, and on the other, the destitute or outcast mother. The widow, and the virgin visiting her promised bridegroom's urn, suffer mentally, their unbalance implied in the obsessive rituals of mourning. The vagrant and the naked beggar, their plight mirrored by flower or ruin, suffer physically in their exposure to the elements. At first Wordsworth accepts this compartmentalized view; only much later, in the storm-beaten thorn or the ruined cottage, does he achieve the transfer of physical suffering to the insentient world which allows him to deal fully with inner states. An Evening Walk presents the female beggar in terms of grotesquely exaggerated torment—first burning, then freezing, first assailed by ‘arrowy fire’, then by ‘bitter showers’. The howling storm of the earlier draft is rewritten as a lurid melodrama of Tempest and Light'ning, Fear and Death:

          Oh! when the bitter showers her path assail,
And roars between the hills the torrent gale,
—No more her breath can thaw their fingers cold,
Their frozen arms her neck no more can fold;
Scarce heard, their chattering lips her shoulder chill,
And her cold back their colder bosoms thrill;
All blind she wilders o'er the lightless heath,
Led by Fear's cold wet hand, and dogg'd by Death;
Death, as she turns her neck the kiss to seek,
Breaks off the dreadful kiss with angry shriek.
Snatch'd from her shoulder with despairing moan,
She clasps them at that dim-seen roofless stone.—
‘Now ruthless Tempest launch thy deadliest dart!
Fall fires—but let us perish heart to heart.’
Weak roof a cow'ring form two babes to shield,
And faint the fire a dying heart can yield;
Press the sad kiss, fond mother! vainly fears
Thy flooded cheek to wet them with its tears;
Soon shall the Light'ning hold before thy head
His torch, and shew them slumbering in their bed,
No tears can chill them, and no bosom warms,
Thy breast their death-bed, coffin'd in thine arms.(9)

The snatch of dialogue, later to be used with such poignant restraint in Wordsworth's narrative poetry, at this stage reveals only his distance from his subject. A reference in 1842 to ‘the mischievous influence of Darwin's dazzling manner’¹⁰ points to the model for his early sensationalist treatment of suffering. It is disquieting to put the death of the female beggar beside the fanciful tragedy of Tremella, a frozen fungus, in The Botanic Garden. Darwin's note inadvertently undercuts the cliché by which suffering and exposure are equated in late eighteenth-century poetry: ‘I have frequently observed fungusses of this Genus on old rails and on the ground to become a transparent jelly, after they had been frozen in autumnal mornings …’:¹¹

Round the dark craggs the murmuring whirlwinds blow,
Woods groan above, and waters roar below;
As o'er the steeps with pausing foot she moves,
The pitying Dryads shriek amid their groves;
She flys,—she stops,—she pants—she looks behind,
And hears a demon howl in every wind.
—As the bleak blast unfurls her fluttering vest,
Cold beats the snow upon her shuddering breast;
Through her numb'd limbs the chill sensations dart,
And the keen ice-bolt trembles at her heart.
‘I sink, I fall! oh, help me, help!’ she cries,
Her stiffening tongue the unfinish'd sound denies;
Tear after tear adown her cheek succeeds,
And pearls of ice bestrew the glistering meads;
Congealing snows her lingering feet surround,
Arrest her flight, and root her to the ground;
With suppliant arms she pours the silent prayer,
Her suppliant arms hang crystal in the air;
Pellucid films her shivering neck o'erspread,
Seal her mute lips, and silver o'er her head,
Veil her pale bosom, glaze her lifted hands,
And shrined in ice the beauteous statue stands.(12)

Darwin has evoked our pity only to suggest how much more decorative Tremella is after her icy metamorphosis. He can get away with manipulating the reader's feelings because we recognize his basic frivolity; Wordsworth is in a different position. When the shrieking dryads and howling demons of The Botanic Garden reappear as Death, breaking off ‘the dreadful kiss with angry shriek’, or ‘the keen ice-bolt’ becomes the ‘deadliest dart’ of a ‘ruthless Tempest’, or Tremella herself becomes a real woman frozen to death, his human sympathy is inevitably called in question.

Wordsworth's next attempt at narrative exchanged some of Darwin's glitter for Thomson's realism. The description of the snow-mazed farmer in ‘Winter’ is the major eighteenth-century precursor of these later deaths by cold. Darwin and Wordsworth both personify the horrors of exposure (‘And hears a demon howl in every wind’, ‘Led by Fear's cold wet hand, and dogg'd by Death’); Thomson, by contrast, makes even such perils as pits, bogs, and precipices the product of the imagination. For the farmer, lost in his own unrecognizable fields, the real dangers are exhaustion and despair. The reality is at once more prosaic and more frightening than anything in The Botanic Garden or An Evening Walk:

                                                                                          down he sinks
Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift,
Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death,
Mixt with the tender anguish nature shoots
Thro' the wrung bosom of the dying man,
His wife, his children, and his friends unseen.
In vain for him th'officious wife prepares
The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm;
In vain his little children, peeping out
Into the mingling rack, demand their sire,
With tears of artless innocence. Alas!
Nor wife, nor children more shall he behold,
Nor friends, nor sacred home. On every nerve,
The deadly winter seizes; shuts up sense;
And, o'er his stronger vitals creeping cold,
Lays him along the snows, a stiffen'd corpse,
Unstretch'd, and bleaching in the northern blast.(13)

The farmer's lethargy tells one more about dying of exposure than all Tremella's frozen tears, and his dying thoughts of family and friends permit him to be human rather than heroic. In Descriptive Sketches, farmer becomes chamois-hunter, his setting the Alps. Wordsworth's showy idiom continues to reflect Darwin's influence (‘The Demon of the snow with angry roar / Descending …’),¹⁴ but the end of the hunter's audacious, doomed climb goes back to Thomson:

Then with despair's whole weight his spirits sink,
No bread to feed him, and the snow his drink,
While ere his eyes can close upon the day,
The eagle of the Alps o'ershades his prey.
—Meanwhile his wife and child with cruel hope
All night the door at every moment ope;
Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
Passing his father's bones in future days,
Start at the reliques of that very thigh,
On which so oft he prattled when a boy.(15)

Wordsworth is still intrigued by the macabre (‘the reliques of that very thigh, / On which so oft he prattled …’), but he has made a new attempt to convey the despair and anxiety involved in such a death. He goes still further in revising the episode of the female beggar, during his 1794 work on An Evening Walk. Her fate is shifted onto another, anonymous woman, and a note added to authenticate the manner of her death (‘These verses relate the catastrophe of a poor woman who was found dead on Stanemoor two winters ago with her two children whom she had in vain attempted to protect from the storm in the manner here described’):

—Ah then, to baffle the relentless Storm,
She tries each fond device Despair can form,
Beneath her stiffened coats to shield them strives,
With love whose providence in death survives.
When morning breaks I see the [] swain,
Sole moving shape in all that boundless plain,
Start at her stedfast form by horror deck'd,
Dead, and as if in act to move, erect.—(16)

Once again the episode ends on a distinctly macabre note: but Wordsworth has replaced the earlier woman's heroic challenge to the elements with a credible gesture of protection. Horror, now externalized in the reaction of the swain who discovers the frozen tableau, is no longer taken for granted. Wordsworth is at last beginning to look critically at his earlier approach to the poetry of suffering.

But the major change which took place in Wordsworth's narrative writing during the 1790s was not so much a shift from sensationalism to realism, as a preparedness to see suffering in terms of unbalance as well as physical privation. As he grew more concerned with—perhaps simply more aware of—human feeling, the drama of exposure to the elements gave way to the drama within. The Prelude allusion to ‘The tragic super-tragic’ has behind it a tradition scarcely less lugubrious than Wordsworth's self-parody. The bereaved virgin of Warton's ‘Ode’ figures in Blair's Grave of 1743:

          The new-made Widow too, I've sometimes spy'd,
Sad Sight! slow moving o'er the prostrate Dead:
Listless, she crawls along in doleful Black,
Whilst Bursts of Sorrow gush from either Eye,
Fast-falling down her now untasted Cheek.
Prone on the lowly Grave of the Dear Man
She drops; whilst busy-meddling Memory,
In barbarous Succession, musters up
The past Endearments of their softer Hours,
Tenacious of its Theme. Still, still she thinks
She sees him, and indulging the fond Thought,
Clings yet more closely to the senseless Turf,
Nor heeds the Passenger who looks that Way.(17)

Blair, however, is interested in the imagination as well as in tears—‘Still, still she thinks / She sees him’. The widow's state is as much morbid as pathetic. Wordsworth himself clearly draws on The Grave for his own study of obsessive bereavement in The Borderers. Blair's widow has become ‘A maid, who fell a prey to the Lord Clifford’, and his sentimental gloom is displaced by the gothic colouring of Wordsworth's play:

                                                                                                                        alas!
What she had seen and suffered—the poor wretch,
It turned her brain—and now she lives alone
Nor moves her hands to any needful work.
She eats the food which every day the peasants
Bring to her hut, and so the wretch has lived
Ten years; and no one ever heard her voice
But every night at the first stroke of twelve
She quits her house, and in the neighbouring church-yard
Upon the self-same spot, in rain or storm,
She paces out the hour 'twixt twelve and one,
She paces round and round, still round and round
And in the church-yard sod her feet have worn
A hollow ring; they say it is knee-deep—(18)

Like Martha in ‘The Thorn’, the woman is seen from a distance, characterized only by the compulsiveness of her grief and surrounded by a fog of hearsay (‘they say it is knee-deep’). Later, Wordsworth provides an eye-witness account that takes up Blair's stress on the widow's oblivious absorption (‘Nor heeds the Passenger who looks that Way’):

'Twas a calm night as I remember well
The moon shone clear; the air was still—so still,
The trees were silent as the graves beneath them;
The church-clock from within the steeple tower
Tick'd audibly—a full half hour did I
Prolong my watch; I saw her pacing round
Upon the self same spot, still round and round
Her lips for ever moving.(19)

Here the woman's setting both complements and expresses her silent preoccupation. Calm night, still air, and silent trees focus our attention on the inner life revealed by her moving lips. Compulsiveness has become introspection, and the furrowed ring of turf gives way to a realization of the woman's mental state; spectacle is replaced by insight. Wordsworth is on the way to creating a poetry of suffering—whether understated as the mere lack of will to survive, in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, or released in a single, haunting cry (‘“O misery!”’) in ‘The Thorn’.

Wordsworth's concern with unbalance is matched by his growing concern with social victims. Like many of his contemporaries, he turned to narrative poetry to express his indignation at the plight of the poor, the dispossessed, and the casualties of war. In his ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, written in early 1793, Wordsworth alludes in passing to the legal enforcement of inadequate wages and the consequent gulf between rich and poor—

Even from the astonishing amount of the sums raised for the support of one description of the poor may be concluded the extent and greatness of that oppression, whose effects have rendered it possible for the few to afford so much, and have shewn us that such a multitude of our brothers exist in even helpless indigence.²⁰

—and he goes on to attack ‘an infatuation which is now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor, and consigning the rest to the more slow and more painful consumption of want’.²¹ It is anti-war protest, as well as the more general humanitarian protest of the period, that provides the chief impulse behind Salisbury Plain. Already in An Evening Walk Wordsworth had adapted the pathetic episode to topical ends. The female beggar is a soldier's widow—along with her orphan children, the central figure in anti-war protest of the 1790s:

—With backward gaze, lock'd joints, and step of pain,
Her seat scarce left, she strives, alas! in vain,
To teach their limbs along the burning road
A few short steps to totter with their load,
Shakes her numb arm that slumbers with its weight,
And eyes through tears the mountain's shadeless height;
And bids her soldier come her woes to share,
Asleep on Minden's charnel plain afar;
For hope's deserted well why wistful look?
Chok'd is the pathway, and the pitcher broke.(22)

Unexpectedly, the passage provides one of the underlying symbols of ‘The Ruined Cottage’—‘The useless fragment of a wooden bowl’ which the Pedlar finds beside Margaret's overgrown well;²³ the metaphor of hopelessness, used with such restraint in the later poem, is characteristically explicit here. Understatement is not to be the method of the protest poetry of the 1790s. Southey and Coleridge, in Joan of Arc and Religious Musings, both rely on the war-widow to come forward ‘with damning eloquence’ and ‘Against the mighty plead!’,²⁴ and both use her anguish for propagandist purposes. Even the passage which most closely anticipates the plight of Margaret in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, from Southey's Joan of Arc, uses mental torment primarily as a weapon to turn against the oppressor:

                                                                                          At her cottage door,
The wretched one shall sit, and with dim eye
Gaze o'er the plain, where on his parting steps
Her last look hung. Nor ever shall she know
Her husband dead, but tortur'd with vain hope,
Gaze on—then heart-sick turn to her poor babe,
And weep it fatherless!(25)

Salisbury Plain is the first poem to make the destitute war-widow significant in her own right rather than a symbol of oppression.

In An Evening Walk, Wordsworth had of course been referring to earlier wars. He was clearly recollecting Langhorne's ‘Apology for Vagrants’ from The Country Justice (1774-7):

          Perhaps on some inhospitable Shore
The houseless Wretch a widow'd Parent bore;
Who, then, no more by golden Prospects led,
Of the poor Indian begg'd a Leafy bed.
Cold on Canadian Hills, or Minden's Plain,
Perhaps that Parent mourn'd her Soldier slain;
Bent o'er her Babe, her Eye dissolv'd in Dew,
The big Drops mingling with the Milk He drew,
Gave the sad Presage of his future Years,
The Child of Misery, baptiz'd in Tears!(26)

Langhorne's influence on the early Wordsworth can be gauged from his much later tribute to The Country Justice in a letter of 1837: ‘As far as I know, it is the first Poem, unless perhaps Shenstone's Schoolmistress be excepted, that fairly brought the Muse into the Company of common life, to which it comes nearer than Goldsmith, and upon which it looks with a tender and enlightened humanity …’²⁷ It is difficult to think of Langhorne as in any real sense the poet of ‘common life’; though enlightened and conscientious, his stance is scarcely one of identification. But his humanitarian emphasis made him a powerful counterbalance to writers like Darwin, and his concern with social victims underlies Wordsworth's much more far-reaching protest in Salisbury Plain. Langhorne's is essentially a poetry of indignation, aiming to shock the reader out of his assumptions by confronting him with glaring miscarriages of justice or shortcomings in poor-law administration. One episode, perhaps the best-known, has special relevance to the kind of problem which Wordsworth sets his readers in Salisbury Plain. A thief on the run stumbles on a dead woman who has just given birth to a child on a desolate heath:

The pitying Robber, conscious that, pursued,
He had no Time to waste, yet stood and view'd;
To the next Cot the trembling Infant bore,
And gave a Part of what He stole before;
Nor known to Him the Wretches were, nor dear,
He felt as Man, and dropp'd a human Tear.
          Far other Treatment She who breathless lay,
Found from a viler Animal of Prey.
          Worn with long Toil on many a painful Road,
That Toil increas'd by Nature's growing Load,
When Evening brought the friendly Hour of Rest,
And all the Mother throng'd about her Breast,
The Ruffian Officer oppos'd her Stay,
And, cruel, bore her in her Pangs away,
So far beyond the Town's last Limits drove,
That to return were hopeless, had She strove.
Abandon'd there—with Famine, Pain and Cold,
And Anguish, She expir'd—the rest I've told.
          ‘Now let Me swear—For, by my Soul's last Sigh,
‘That Thief shall live, that Overseer shall die.’
          Too late!—His Life the generous Robber paid,
Lost by that Pity which his Steps delay'd!(28)

Wordsworth's method in Salisbury Plain is to consist of a series of encounters—with the Female Vagrant, with a quarrelling family, with a dying woman—each providing the same step-by-step illustration of the poem's message; like Langhorne, Wordsworth suggests that the only refuge of the poor lies in mutual compassion. Wordsworth, however, goes much further. There is no moral conflict in siding with Langhorne's robber against the parish officer, but Wordsworth's sailor is a murderer. The artificially clear-cut issues of protest poetry have come close to the painful conflict of tragedy. Langhorne aims to provoke his reader (‘“Now let Me swear …”’): Wordsworth aims to take him beyond indignation to an appalled identification with the victims of hardship and oppression in an unjust society.

The other major influence on protest writers of the late eighteenth century would have been Goldsmith—mentioned alongside Langhorne in Wordsworth's tribute. To this period, The Deserted Village was the greatest of all laments for dispossession:

          Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green:
One only master grasps the whole domain …(29)

But none of Goldsmith's successors recaptures his nostalgia; The Country Justice offers us tears of outrage—

Harmless to You his Towers, his Forests rise,
That swell with Anguish my indignant Eyes;
While in those Towers raz'd Villages I see,
And Tears of Orphans watering every Tree.(30)

—and Wordsworth in ‘The Female Vagrant’ bleakly records a process which the smallholder is powerless to resist:

Then rose a mansion proud our woods among,
And cottage after cottage owned its sway,
No joy to see a neighbouring house, or stray
Through pastures not his own, the master took …

(ll. 39-42)

But Wordsworth differs from his predecessors in using the theme of dispossession to explore the emotions of the dispossessed themselves. Like Goldsmith, he mourns a lost idyll, yet it is not the passing of the idyll for its own sake that matters most to him. His subject is human—not a village, not a place, but individual men and women. In The Deserted Village Goldsmith had expressed the disruption of an entire community by exhibiting a single family:

          Good Heaven! what sorrows gloom'd that parting day,
That called them from their native walks away;
When the poor exiles, every pleasure past,
Hung round their bowers, and fondly looked their last,
And took a long farewell, and wished in vain
For seats like these beyond the western main;
And shuddering still to face the distant deep,
Returned and wept, and still returned to weep.
The good old sire, the first prepared to go
To new found worlds, and wept for others woe.
But for himself, in conscious virtue brave,
He only wished for worlds beyond the grave.
His lovely daughter, lovelier in her tears,
The fond companion of his helpless years,
Silent went next, neglectful of her charms,
And left a lover's for her father's arms.(31)

Both poets are concerned with uprooted families, but where Goldsmith depicts a tableau, Wordsworth takes one inside the minds of the Female Vagrant and her father as they leave their home after ruin and eviction:

Can I forget that miserable hour,
When from the last hill-top, my sire surveyed,
Peering above the trees, the steeple tower,
That on his marriage-day sweet music made?
Till then he hoped his bones might there be laid,
Close by my mother in their native bowers:
Bidding me trust in God, he stood and prayed,—
I could not pray:—through tears that fell in showers,
Glimmer'd our dear-loved home, alas! no longer ours!

(ll. 55-63)

Goldsmith's figures are deliberately generalized; the ‘widowed’ solitary thing / That feebly bends beside the plashy spring, exists to tell us about Auburn—‘The sad historian of the pensive plain’.³² In ‘The Female Vagrant’, however, protest goes with an interest in the workings of human feeling—in the old man's affection for the church where he was married and his wife lies buried, in his daughter's despairing inability to pray. Wordsworth is not only moving away from the static episode or tableau; he is moving away from the social victim, dwarfed by the injustice he exists to expose, towards the human being and his individual capacity for suffering.

II. SALISBURY PLAIN

The most impressive protest poem of its time was undoubtedly Salisbury Plain.³³ How much it mattered to Wordsworth himself can be gauged from its development during the mid-1790s. Focused at first on the story of the Female Vagrant, it became in effect a new poem when the complementary story of the sailor was added in 1795. Still intended for publication in 1798, it underwent further revision in 1799.³⁴ The basis of ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ (as Wordsworth wanted to call the earliest surviving version)³⁵ probably goes back to a period even before 1793. The story of the Female Vagrant begins as little more than a reworking of the stock humanitarian themes, couched in a Spenserian stanza probably inspired by Shenstone or, more recently, by Beattie's Minstrel.³⁶ Introduced as a fading village maiden (‘Might Beauty charm the canker worm of pain / The rose on her sweet cheek had ne'er declined’),³⁷ the Female Vagrant is presented in terms of a shattered idyll—lost beauty, lost love, lost well-being, Like Goldsmith, Wordsworth describes a way of life in order to make its disruption the more painful, but as yet Goldsmith's method is used to very limited effect. We are shown the regular alternations of work and play in the Female Vagrant's past, but the equation of employment and happiness is never made as it is to be in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, and when we are told that ‘The loom stood still’³⁸ there are none of the tragic overtones of the later poem. Dispossession first, then the ravages of war, precipitate her into dependence on a precarious family happiness, and finally into the unrelieved despair with which the second part of the poem is largely concerned. With this second part, ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ emerges as a forerunner—however crude—of Wordsworth's mature studies of suffering. The narrative sweeps relentlessly towards, not disaster, but its aftermath, alienation:

‘All perished, all in one remorseless year
Husband and children one by one by sword
And scourge of fiery fever: every tear
Dried up, despairing, desolate, on board
A British ship I waked as from a trance restored.’(39)

Released from a nightmare world of carnage, famine, and death by the calm of her homeward voyage, the Female Vagrant wakes to another kind of dream. Unlike the sailors on the man-of-war, she has no ‘pleasant thoughts of home,’ no capacity for tears:

‘Some mighty gulf of separation passed
I seemed transported to another world;
A dream resigned with pain when from the mast
The impatient mariner the sail unfurled
And whistling called the wind that hardly curled
The silent seas. The pleasant thoughts of home
With tears his weather-beaten cheek impearled.
For me, farthest from earthly port to roam
Was best, my only wish to shun where man might come.’(40)

The ‘mighty gulf of separation’ is more than the gulf between war and peace; it is the gulf between living and no longer having a reason to live:

‘And oft robbed of my perfect mind I thought
At last my feet a resting-place had found.
Here will I weep in peace so Fancy wrought,
Roaming the illimitable waters round,
Here gaze of every friend but Death disowned,
All day my ready tomb the ocean flood.
To break my dream the vessel reached its bound
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.’(41)

This is the peace of despair, a withdrawal from human bonds (‘of every friend but Death disowned’) which is tragic in its implications. Like Margaret in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, the Female Vagrant loses her humanity through losing those she loves; set ashore, she can only become a wanderer, for without human ties there can be ‘no house in prospect but the tomb’.⁴² Her rootlessness reflects a deeper deprivation.

The story of the Female Vagrant is framed by poetry of a quite different kind. Wordsworth's hallucinatory experiences as he crossed Salisbury Plain in the summer of 1793⁴³ are combined with a mood of bitter social protest to produce writing of dramatic oddity and violence. On one level, at least, ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ is a record of private desolation that looks forward to the Prelude accounts of guilt, fear, and ‘visionary dreariness’. The benighted traveller who later encounters the Female Vagrant and listens to her story crosses the plain in a state which cannot be explained by his weariness, hunger, and thirst. These are part of a larger desolation—lack of human contact in a landscape whose ‘wastes of corn’ bring none of the familiar, reassuring associations: ‘where the sower dwelt was nowhere to be found’.⁴⁴ The emptiness is dreamlike, and with dreamlike panic and ineffectuality the traveller hails a far-off, unhearing shepherd—

No sound replies but winds that whistling near
Sweep the thin grass and passing, wildly plain;
Or desert lark that pours on high a wasted strain.(45)

Later on in the poem, the Female Vagrant describes her encounter with a figure who symbolizes the plain's obscure hostility to human life:

The woman told that through a hollow deep
As on she journeyed far from spring or bower,
An old man beckoning from the naked steep
Came tottering sidelong down to ask the hour;
There never clock was heard from steeple tower.
From the wide corn the plundering crows to scare
He held a rusty gun. In sun and shower,
Old as he was, alone he lingered there,
His hungry meal too scant for dog that meal to share.(46)

Everything in this land-locked solitude suggests a relentless whittling away of humanity. The clock is too far, the meal too small for a dog to share; the old man totters, and his gun is rusty. Yet he still pointlessly asks the time in a timeless landscape, clinging to human habits in a setting where they have no relevance. Only the plundering crows can triumph over their environment. For the traveller, there is menace as well as hopelessness; like the crows, the very elements seem predatory—‘He stood the only creature in the wild / On whom the elements their rage could wreak …’⁴⁷ The hallucinations of druid rites which follow enact his state of mind. ‘Mocked as by a hideous dream’, he is urged to

‘Fly ere the fiends their prey unwares devour;
‘Or grinning, on thy endless tortures scowl
‘Till very madness seem a mercy to thy soul.’(48)

Despite the luridness of the writing, the traveller's flight ‘as if his terror dogged his road’ is entirely convincing. Later, Wordsworth tries to play down the traveller's vision, reinterpreting it in the light of local superstition; he and the Female Vagrant meet nothing more supernatural than each other at the lonely ‘spital’ in which they take shelter. But the neurotic, disturbing power of Wordsworth's writing can no more be disowned than it can be integrated into the poem as a whole.

‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ contains a powerful imaginative expression of Wordsworth's own horror and rejection of social institutions. This was the period of his worst relationship with society—unemployed, disapproved of by his family, separated from Annette and his child in France. It was a melodramatic way of putting it, but he too must have looked with resentment at ‘those, who on the couch of Affluence rest / By laughing Fortune's sparkling cup elate’.⁴⁹ His problems, however, were not merely personal; like other radicals of the period he was profoundly alienated from the policies of the Government, now committed to war against France; and he had just come from watching the British fleet arming off Portsmouth.⁵⁰ The traveller's hallucinations represent the persecutions and terrors of contemporary society. The Female Vagrant is no better off than the savage who once lived his precarious existence on the plain; druids no longer offer human sacrifice, but the light of reason serves only to illuminate the appalling sacrifices offered up in the name of civilization:

Though from huge wickers paled with circling fire
No longer horrid shrieks and dying cries
To ears of Demon-Gods in peals aspire,
To Demon-Gods a human sacrifice;
Though Treachery her sword no longer dyes
In the cold blood of Truce, still, reason's ray
What does it more than while the tempests rise,
With starless glooms and sounds of loud dismay
Reveal with still-born glimpse the terrors of our way?(51)

Consolations are few in such a world. As in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, the imperviousness and continuity of nature in the face of human distress offer an obscure comfort, and with the end of the Female Vagrant's story and the coming of dawn the mood changes. But as the wanderers look down on a peopled and welcoming valley in the light of morning, Wordsworth underlines his cheerless moral:

          think that life is like this desart broad,
Where all the happiest find is but a shed
And a green spot 'mid wastes interminably spread.(52)

Clumsy as it is, Wordsworth's metaphor endorses the more effective symbolism of the desolate plain, with its fleeing, cowering figures overwhelmed by storm and night. The druidic imagery has been sufficiently powerful to license the violence of his closing exhortation:

Heroes of Truth, pursue your march, uptear
Th'Oppressor's dungeon from its deepest base;
High o'er the towers of Pride undaunted rear
Resistless in your might the herculean mace
Of Reason; let foul Error's monster race
Dragged from their dens start at the light with pain
And die; pursue your toils, till not a trace
Be left on earth of Superstition's reign,
Save that eternal pile which frowns on Sarum's plain.(53)

Wordsworth lacks an appropriate language of protest, and his Godwinian invocation to Reason is supremely mismatched with the archaism of The Faerie Queene. Yet the contorted rhetoric and Spenserian associations (‘Error's monster race’) graphically convey Wordsworth's vision, both of a monstrous world and of the wished-for millennium.

The highly-wrought writing which surrounds the story of the Female Vagrant accentuated its slightness. Wordsworth himself seems to have seen that ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ could not hold together, and the expanded poem of 1795-6—‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’—is radically altered in focus. Transformed into a sailor on the run after committing a murder, the traveller himself becomes the new centre of interest, adding another theme of protest to the original anti-war message of 1793. ‘It's object’, wrote Wordsworth of the revised poem in autumn 1795, ‘is partly to expose the vices of the penal law and the calamities of war as they affect individuals.’⁵⁴ Wordsworth's position is that of Godwin in Political Justice, where crime is represented as the result of intolerable social oppression: ‘A numerous class of mankind are held down in a state of abject penury, and are continually prompted by disappointment and distress to commit violence upon their more fortunate neighbours.’⁵⁵ The sailor has been press-ganged, then cheated by a corrupt bureaucracy of the earnings he had hoped to bring back to his family. In a mood of desperation, he robs and kills a traveller near his home, and flees. Wordsworth's interest in such moments of isolated and desperate violence is emphasized by an episode later on in the poem. As they cross the plain together, sailor and Female Vagrant come on a man striking down his playful child in sudden, uncontrolled anger. The child on the ground appears to the sailor as an image of the man he has murdered, and he expostulates with the father, who repents and kisses his son. But repentance cannot save the sailor himself, for ‘justice’ is implacably concerned not with his better nature but with retribution. Once more, Wordsworth's position is Godwinian:

It cannot be just that we should inflict suffering on any man, except so far as it tends to good. Hence it follows that the strict acceptation of the word punishment by no means accords with any sound principles of reasoning. … To punish [a man] upon any hypothesis for what is past and irrecoverable … must be ranked among the wildest conceptions of untutored barbarism.⁵⁶

The symbol of this ‘untutored barbarism’ in ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ is the gibbet with its chained corpse, a cautionary sight familiar to eighteenth-century travellers. At the start of the poem, it overwhelms the sailor with terror and inspires his previously unmotivated flight across the plain—a landscape now suggestive not simply of a harsh and desolate world, but of the isolation brought about by one man's crime against another. At the end of the poem, the gibbet recurs, this time bearing the chained corpse of the sailor himself:

They left him hung on high in iron case,
And dissolute men, unthinking & untaught,
Planted their festive [?booths] beneath his face;
And to that spot which idle thousands sought,
Women & children were by fathers brought;
And now some kindred sufferer driven, perchance
That way when into storm the sky is wrought,
Upon his swinging corpse his eye may glance
And drop as he once dropp'd in miserable trance.(57)

The cycle of suffering can only be perpetuated (‘And now some kindred sufferer …’) in a society that is at once vengeful and uncaring.

‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ shows not only an appalled awareness of society's indifference to the criminals it has created, but remarkable insight into the psychology of guilt. Wordsworth's source for the sailor's story had been crudely sensational—the confession of Jarvis Matchan, a sailor who murdered a drummer-boy in 1780 and six years later confessed to his companion as they tramped across Salisbury Plain in a storm. Widely reported at the time,⁵⁸ Matchan's confession was supposed to have been prompted by supernatural manifestations of divine wrath. In Wordsworth's poem (as in Peter Bell) it is not the supernatural that accuses him, but his own conscience. Contact with his kind—with the Female Vagrant, with the quarrelling family, and finally with his own wife—makes his crime increasingly insupportable. It is the accidental meeting with his wife, now destitute and dying, that brings him at last to give himself up. Wordsworth's handling of the sailor's remorse shows the humanity of his vision in Salisbury Plain. Ostensibly, he draws on a passage from Fawcett's Art of War (1795) describing the murderer's conscience-stricken torment:

He starts, when nothing stirr'd;—‘Who speaks?’—he asks,
When no one spoke; and mutters things unheard
With nimble-moving lips that send no sound.
Disturb'd e'en in the stillest room he lies;
Kept by no noise awake, no sleep he finds,
Or no oblivion finds it.(59)

But Wordsworth's purpose is very different. The guilt of Fawcett's assassin exists to expose, by contrast, society's acceptance of mass murder in war. The sailor's torment, however, suggests his fundamental redeemability and his value as a human being. What breaks him is the knowledge of the irreparable harm he has done to his wife:

For him alternate throbbed his pulse & stopp'd;
And when at table placed the bread he took
To break it, from his faltering hands it dropp'd,
While on those hands he cast a rueful look.
His ears were never silent, sleep forsook
His nerveless eyelids stiffen'd even as lead;
All through the night the floor beneath him shook
And chamber trembled to his shuddering bed;
And oft he groan'd aloud, ‘Oh God that I were dead!’(60)

The sailor is unmanned by his essential goodness. When he gives himself up, his death comes as a travesty of justice; but it is also a mercy:

Blest be for once the stroke which ends, tho' late
The pangs which from thy halls of terror came,
Thou who of Justice bear'st the violated name.(61)

The echo of Lear is a reminder that, like the story of the Female Vagrant, his has been a tragedy of waste.

Beside the psychological insight and unflinching intention of the sailor's story, that of the Female Vagrant was bound to seem lightweight. The version excerpted for Lyrical Ballads in 1798 was at some stage expanded and revised in an attempt to give it new stature.⁶² As well as an increased element of protest (additional stanzas on the theme of dispossession and the horrors of war), Wordsworth achieves a considerable gain in narrative subtlety. In ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’, little had been made of the stoppage of work with the outbreak of war—‘The loom stood still: unwatched the idle gale / Wooed in deserted shrouds the unregarding sail’⁶³—but in the final version, the link is made, as it is to be in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, between work and wellbeing, idleness and deracination: ‘The empty loom, cold hearth, and silent wheel, / And tears that flowed for ills which patience could not heal’ (ll. 89-90). Again, the stiff personifications of the earlier version (‘How changed at once! for Labour's chearful hum / Silence and Tears and Misery's weeping train …’)⁶⁴ are transformed into a subdued and realistic statement of hardship: ‘'Twas a hard change, an evil time was come; / We had no hope, and no relief could gain’ (ll. 91-2). But the major development is the new weight given to the Female Vagrant's state of mind after her return. Wordsworth makes it clear that she starves not only because society fails to feed her, but because she fails to feed herself. She is ‘By grief enfeebled’ (l. 181), not just by hunger—like Margaret, deprived of the will to survive. Hers is the inertia of despair:

Ill was I then for toil or service fit:
With tears whose course no effort could confine,
By high-way side forgetful would I sit
Whole hours, my idle arms in moping sorrow knit.
I lived upon the mercy of the fields,
And oft of cruelty the sky accused …

(ll. 249-54)

Her state of mind is revealed not so much by tears as by a stance (‘my idle arms in moping sorrow knit’), and by her unbalanced vision of a hostile world (‘And oft of cruelty the sky accused’). Significantly, the Female Vagrant's final lament—‘But, what afflicts my peace with keenest ruth / Is, that I have my inner self abused …’ (ll. 258-9)—is echoed later by Margaret, in ‘The Ruined Cottage’: ‘“I am changed, / And to myself”, said she, “have done much wrong …”’⁶⁵ The two women have wronged themselves as Tess has done when Angel Clare finds her in Sandbourne: ‘his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will.’⁶⁶ Hardy's insight, paralleled in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, is already anticipated in ‘The Female Vagrant’; and the two writers have in common their painful vision of a world in which the oppressed can only strike back at the oppressor by sealing their own doom as victims. Like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Salisbury Plain extenuates neither suffering nor injustice, and its final note is one of tragic protest rather than consolation.

Notes

1. Prelude, viii. 530-41.

2. Ibid. viii. 517.

3. A Collection of Poems, ed. Robert Dodsley, iii (1748), 81. See Carol Landon's valuable essay, ‘Some Sidelights on The Prelude’, Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, p. 373.

4. Salisbury Plain—as distinct from the version published in 1842 as Guilt and Sorrow—properly comprises the two early poems referred to as ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ (MS. 1) and ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ (MS. 2).

5. Prelude, viii. 550-9.

6. An Evening Walk (London, 1793), ll. 241-4.

7. Ibid., ll. 274-8.

8. DC MS. 2; there is another draft in DC MS. 6. For the date of both, see Reed, pp. 307-10. Wordsworth's reference is to the ‘fragmentary’ final stanza of Lady Wardlaw's Hardyknute (Edinburgh, 1719), p. 12:

   Loud and chill blew westlin Wind,
   Sair beat the heavy Shower,
   Mirk grew the Night ere Hardyknute
   Wan near his stately Tower …

9. An Evening Walk, ll. 279-300.

10. PW iii. 442 (MS. note of 1842). Cf. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria reference to the ephemeral popularity of The Botanic Garden (Shawcross, i. 11-12), and Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, pp. 50-1.

11. The Botanic Garden, II (1789), p. 36n.

12. The Botanic Garden, II. i. 387-408. The couplet draft in DC MS. 7 where the original blank verse draft reaches virtually its final form in An Evening Walk, ll. 279-300, dates from roughly the same period as the publication of the second part of The Botanic Garden in 1789. Reed groups this draft with the earlier ones in DC MSS. 2 and 6 as belonging to 1788 (see Reed, pp. 309 and n., 310), but there is no reason why it should not date from the following year and thus reflect the immediate impact of Darwin on the young Wordsworth.

13. ‘Winter’, ll. 379-95.

14. Descriptive Sketches (London, 1793), ll. 400-1.

15. Ibid., ll. 404-13. For another episode by Wordsworth which may date from this period, and which seems to have formed the basis for Coleridge's ‘Old Man of the Alps’ (published in the Morning Post for 8 March 1798), see J. W. Smyser, PMLA lxv (1960), 422; R. S. Woof, SB xv (1962), 167-9; and Reed, p. 23 and n.

16. DC MS. 9: PW i. 28-9 app. crit. and 29n. For the factual basis claimed by Wordsworth's note, see Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, p. 52n.

17. The Grave (London, 1743), ll. 72-84.

18. MS. B: PW i. 143, ll. 381-95 and app. crit.

19. MS. B: PW i. 150, ll. 573-9 and app. crit.

20. DC MS. 8: Prose Works, i. 43.

21. Ibid.: Prose Works, i. 49.

22. An Evening Walk, ll. 247-56.

23. MS. B: PW v. 389, l. 341.

24. Joan of Arc, iii. 445-6. Cf. Religious Musings, ll. 316-20 (CPW i. 120, ll. 296-300), and, for yet another war-widow, Fawcett's Art of War (London, 1795), pp. 16-17.

25. Ibid. vii. 325-31. Cf. also the passage describing a war-widow in the revised Book I of Southey's poem—Joan of Arc (2nd edn., 2 vols., Bristol, 1798), i. 110-12—which may in turn owe something to Wordsworth's ‘Ruined Cottage’; the revisions took place during the autumn of 1797 (see Curry, i. 153), and it is possible that Southey saw or knew of Wordsworth's poem.

26. The Country Justice (London, 1774-7), i (1774), pp. 17-18. It was evidently Wordsworth's anxiety to avoid a direct echo of Langhorne that led him to change ‘Asleep on Minden's charnel plain afar’ to ‘Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar’ in the ‘Errata’ of An Evening Walk. For a brief discussion of Wordsworth's debt to The Country Justice, see also Roger Sharrock, ‘Wordsworth and John Langhorne's “The Country Justice”’, N & Q N.S. i (1954), 302-4. The passage quoted here was sufficiently well known to have been illustrated by Joseph Wright of Derby in his picture, ‘The Dead Soldier’ of 1789; see Benedict Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby (2 vols., London, 1968), i. 65-6, 153-4; ii, Plate 281.

27. LY ii. 829.

28. The Country Justice, ii (1775), pp. 25-6. The link between this episode and the sailor's story in Salisbury Plain is suggested by Roger Sharrock, N & Q N.S. i. 302-4.

29. The Deserted Village (London, 1770), ll. 35-9.

30. The Country Justice, iii (1777), p. 12.

31. The Deserted Village, ll. 363-78.

32. Ibid., ll. 129-30, 136.

33. For an excellent account of Salisbury Plain, see S. C. Gill, ‘“Adventures on Salisbury Plain” and Wordsworth's Poetry of Protest 1795-7’, SR xi (1972), 48-65.

34. See Griggs, i. 400, 411-12; EY, p. 256; and Reed, pp. 333-6.

35. See EY, p. 136. For a brief account of this version and for a complete text, see S. C. Gill, ‘The Original Salisbury Plain: Introduction and Text’, Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, pp. 142-79. Both versions are discussed more fully by P. D. Sheats in The Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, 1785-1798, pp. 84-94, 108-18.

36. Shenstone's Schoolmistress (1737 and 1742) and Thomson's Castle of Indolence (1748) had revived the Spenserian stanza earlier in the eighteenth century, but it may have been The Minstrel (1771-4) which served as Wordsworth's more immediate model; Beattie's ‘Advertisement’ had enumerated the advantages of the Spenserian stanza for a long poem.

37. MS. i: PW i. 105 app. crit., ll. 47-8.

38. Ibid.: PW i. 110, l. 269.

39. Ibid.: PW i. 111, ll. 302-6 and app. crit.

40. Ibid.: PW i. 114, ll. 352-60 and app. crit.

41. Ibid.: PW i. 114, ll. 361-9 and app. crit.

42. MS. i: PW i. 118, l. 447 and app. crit.

43. See Prelude, xii. 312-53.

44. MS. i: PW i. 96, l. 27 and app. crit.

45. Ibid.: PW i. 96, ll. 34-6 and app. crit.

46. Ibid.: PW i. 103-4 app. crit., ll. 6-14.

47. Ibid.: PW i. 99, ll. 102-3 and app. crit.

48. Ibid.: PW i. 100 app. crit. For a similarly horrific use of druidic associations (‘dying babes in wicker prisons’, ‘Fiends triumphant’), see The Botanic Garden, II. iii. 101-8.

49. Ibid.: PW i. 335.

50. See Reed, pp. 144-5. The predicament of radical intellectuals at this period is well described by E. P. Thompson, ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, Power and Consciousness, ed. C. C. O'Brien and W. D. Vanech (London, 1969), pp. 149-81.

51. MS. 1: PW i. 339, st. 48. Wordsworth's use of the druids to reinforce social criticism is interestingly paralleled by Thomas Love Peacock; see A. L. Owen, The Famous Druids (Oxford, 1962), pp. 158-9.

52. Ibid.: PW i. 339, st. 47.

53. Ibid.: PW i. 340-1; cf. Charles Lloyd in ‘Oswald’ (quoted p. 18, above).

54. EY, p. 159.

55. Political Justice, i. 9.

56. Political Justice, ii. 693-4.

57. MS. 2: PW i. 127, ll. 658-66 and app. crit. By 1842 Wordsworth no longer had the courage to offer his readers ‘the intolerable thought’ with which the earlier poem had ended:

    His fate was pitied. Him in iron case
    (Reader, forgive the intolerable thought)
    They hung not …

    (Guilt and Sorrow, ll. 658-60)

58. See, for instance, reports under ‘Principal Occurrences’ in the New Annual Register for 1786 (1787), pp. 27-8, and Gentleman's Magazine, lvi (June 1786), 521. The entire story is quoted from a lost pamphlet, A Narrative of the Life, Confession, and Dying Speech of Jarvis Matchan, in R. H. Barham's Ingoldsby Legends; or Mirth and Marvels, ed. R. H. Dalton Barham (2 vols., London, 1870), ii. 253-5. I owe this information to Stephen Gill's unpublished thesis, ‘Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain: An Edition of the Three Texts with an Essay on their Place in the Development of his Poetry’ (Edinburgh, 1968), Appendix III.

59. The Art of War, p. 44.

60. MS. 2: PW i. 125, ll. 631-9 and app. crit. For Fawcett's influence on Wordsworth, see also Arthur Beatty, ‘Joseph Fawcett: The Art of War’, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, ii (Madison, 1918), 224-69.

61. Ibid.: PW i. 126, ll. 655-7 and app. crit. Again, there is a marked change of attitude in the 1842 text:

    ‘O welcome sentence which will end though late,’
    He said, ‘the pangs that to my conscience came
    Out of that deed. My trust, Saviour! is in thy name!’

    (Guilt and Sorrow, ll. 655-7)

62. By early 1799, Wordsworth had decided to ‘invent a new story for the woman’, but he regarded 24 stanzas as ‘the utmost tether allowed to the poor Lady’ (EY, pp. 256-7).

63. MS. 1: PW i. 110, ll. 269-70.

64. Ibid.: PW i. 110, ll. 271-2 and app. crit.

65. MS. B: PW v. 396, ll. 602-3. It is hard to see Margaret as a prostitute, but as Meyer suggests (Wordsworth's Formative Years, p. 132), this would be an appropriate culmination of the Female Vagrant's exploitation by society.

66. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Wessex edn., London, 1912), p. 484.

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———‘“Adventures on Salisbury Plain” and Wordsworth's Poetry of Protest 1795-97’, SR xi (1972), 48-65.

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———‘William Wordsworth 1770-1969’, Proceedings of the British Academy, lv (1970), 211-28.

Abbreviations

CCW: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer ([16] vols., London, 1969—).

CPW: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (2 vols., Oxford, 1912).

Curry: New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry (2 vols., New York and London, 1965).

DC: Dove Cottage.

DWJ: Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (2 vols., London, 1941).

EC: Essays in Criticism.

ELH: English Literary History.

EY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787-1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. C. L. Shaver (2nd edn., Oxford, 1967).

Griggs: Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (4 vols., Oxford, 1956-9).

Howe: The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols., London, 1930-4).

I.F. note: Note dictated by Wordsworth to Isabella Fenwick in 1843 and transcribed by Dora and Edward Quillinan.

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

Lucas: The Letters of Charles Lamb to which are added those of his sister Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (3 vols., London, 1935).

LY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years 1821-1850, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (3 vols., Oxford, 1939).

MLN: Modern Language Notes.

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly.

MLR: Modern Language Review.

MP: Modern Philology.

MY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years 1806-1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman and A. G. Hill (2nd edn., 2 vols., Oxford, 1969-70).

N & Q: Notes and Queries.

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

PQ: Philological Quarterly.

Prelude: William Wordsworth: The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire (2nd edn., Oxford, 1959).

Prose Works: The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (3 vols., Oxford, 1974).

PW: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (5 vols., Oxford, 1940-9), vols. ii and iii rev. Helen Darbishire (2nd edn., Oxford, 1952-4).

Reed: Reed, M. L., Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years 1770-1799 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).

REL: Review of English Literature.

RES: Review of English Studies.

SB: Studies in Bibliography.

SEL: Studies in English Literature.

Shawcross: Biographia Literaria by S. T. Coleridge, ed. J. Shawcross (2 vols., Oxford, 1907).

SP: Studies in Philology.

SR: Studies in Romanticism.

UTQ: University of Toronto Quarterly.