Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in print within weeks of Wordsworth’s return to England. (This was a response to Richard Price’s address to the London Revolution Society, now published as a pamphlet.) Burke was then in his sixtieth year; his Reflections were delivered with the authority of an elder statesman, the most intellectual of the Whigs, an exponent of principle in politics, a champion of liberty, and a philosopher of the sublime. Assessing what had happened in France, he argued that nothing good could come from a complete break with the past: on the contrary, such an upheaval must inevitably lead to bloodshed, war and tyranny. He did not oppose change of any kind; but he believed it must be gradual rather than sudden, and rooted in the traditions of the people. His book became a bestseller, and his ideas were much discussed, but by no means generally accepted; the Prince of Wales, for example, then a young radical, scorned it as a jeremiad, ‘a farrago of nonsense’. In the House of Commons, the Prince’s mentor Fox could not resist describing the new government of France as ‘the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country’. Fox and Burke had long been political allies, and when an indignant Burke voiced his opposition to ‘all systems built on abstract rights’ in the debate, Fox whispered his hope that though they disagreed, they might still remain friends. Burke spurned his appeal, declaring aloud that their friendship was at an end. Fox rose to reply, but was so hurt that he could not speak for some minutes, while tears trickled down his cheeks.
Burke’s Reflections infuriated radicals, all the more so because Burke had been such an eloquent critic of the British government at the time of the American Revolution, fifteen years earlier. It provoked any number of hostile responses – including an essay written by Robert Southey, then a Westminster schoolboy – the most famous being Tom Paine’s colossally successful Rights of Man. These in turn inspired further ripostes, one delivered by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, who had initially lauded the French attempts to free themselves from arbitrary rule, but who had come, like Burke, to deplore the results when the passions of human nature were ‘not regulated by religion, or controlled by law’.
Meanwhile Wordsworth had left Cambridge with a mere pass degree, a disappointment to his relatives who had hoped that he might have done well enough to be elected to the Fellowship reserved for men from Cumberland, succeeding his uncle William Cookson. They castigated him for having undertaken such an arduous walking tour in his final long vacation, when he should have been studying. Wordsworth’s future was not a matter for him alone; a successful career would bring influence that could be used for the benefit of the whole family. But he was stubborn. The more his seniors tried to guide him, the more he resisted. An orphan from the age of thirteen, he had since been dependent on his grandfather and two uncles who acted as guardians; with no home of their own, he and his siblings had suffered slights from tactless relatives and insolent servants. Pride and restraint were at war within him. Open rebellion was not an option for Wordsworth; he could not afford to defy his uncles while he remained reliant on them. The most that he could do was to thwart their plans for him.
After quitting Cambridge, Wordsworth spent some months in London, where ‘Free as a colt at pasture on the hills/I ranged at large’.8 He feasted greedily on the spectacle offered by what was then the greatest city in the world: the bustle, the theatres, the shops, the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the prostitutes and the fashionable ladies, the destitute and the wealthy, the extraordinary variety of sights and sounds and smells, all the more extraordinary to one who had grown up in the remote Lakes. As a spectator he attended the law courts, and watched the debates in Parliament, where he marvelled at Pitt’s sustained oratory and was inspired by Burke’s evergreen eloquence.9 His reactions suggest that on the great issues of the moment he was not yet parti pris, even though he was mixing with radicals sympathetic to the French revolutionaries. On Sundays he would often dine with Samuel Nicholson, a Unitarian and a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, afterwards going on with him to hear the popular sermons preached by the minister Joseph Fawcett at the dissenters’ meeting house in Old Jewry. It was probably at this time too that he met another radical dissenter, the bookseller-publisher Joseph Johnson, who lived above his shop in St Paul’s Churchyard.10 Johnson, who would be Wordsworth’s first publisher, combined business acumen with good taste; among the eminent writers he published were Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Malthus, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth. He was also publisher of the liberal monthly the Analytical Review, and was then in the process of publishing the first part of Paine’s Rights of Man.
In the late spring of 1791 Wordsworth left London for Wales, to stay with his walking companion Robert Jones and his sisters. ‘He seems so happy that it is probable he will remain there all the summer,’ observed his sister Dorothy. ‘Who would not be happy enjoying the company of three young ladies in the Vale of Clewyd [sic] and without a rival?’11 Despite these attractions, Wordsworth was able to tear himself away; he and Jones went on a walking tour of north Wales, and made a memorable night ascent of Snowdon to see the sunrise from the summit.*
To his friends at this time, Wordsworth affected a devil-may-care nonchalance. ‘I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life,’ he boasted to another Cambridge friend, William Mathews, after a year in which he cheerfully admitted to doing very little. His family was now trying to steer him towards the Church, but Wordsworth did not relish the prospect of ‘vegetating on a paltry curacy’. Fortunately he was still, at the age of twenty-one, too young to take holy orders; he could afford to look about him a while yet. He appeared to be thinking as much of his own prospects when he urged Mathews to find ‘some method of obtaining an Independence’, which would ‘enable you to get your bread unshackled by the necessity of professing a particular system of opinions… The field of Letters is very extensive, and it is astonishing if we cannot find some little corner, which with a little tillage will produce us enough for the necessities, nay even the comforts, of life.’12
Wordsworth counted himself a ‘philosopher’, in the original sense of a lover of wisdom, one devoted to the search for fundamental truth. In the parlance of the time, the term might equally be applied to a scientist or a naturalist as to a student of political or moral philosophy, or metaphysics. At this stage Wordsworth was far from certain what kind of life lay ahead of him. While at Cambridge he had become increasingly aware of his poetic gifts. The ‘instinctive humbleness’ he felt at the very thought of publication began to ‘melt away’; his ‘dread awe of mighty names’ softened; increasingly he felt a ‘fellowship’ with the authors he revered, and he was filled with ‘a thousand hopes’, ‘a thousand tender dreams’, as ‘a morning gladness’ settled on his mind. He had already completed one long poem, ‘An Evening Walk’; this achievement encouraged the ‘daring thought’ that he
… might leave
Some monument behind me which pure hearts
Should reverence … 13
Yet his feeling of fellowship with the great poets of the past was accompanied by a sense of alienation in the present. At Cambridge he had often been melancholy, conscious that he did not belong. There was ‘a strangeness in my mind’, a solitariness, an impression that he was different. Sometimes he would leave his university friends and walk out into the surrounding country, ‘turning the mind in upon itself’. Then again he would feel
The strength and consolation which were mine.
The swelling appreciation of the powers latent within him strengthened his conviction that he was ‘a chosen son’ of Nature.14
Towards the end of the