Abstract
We probably do not sufficiently emphasize today that Wordsworth was reared and educated from the first in the doctrines of the Anglican faith. The headmaster of the Hawkshead Grammar School, so beloved by him, was an Anglican clergyman. His uncle William Cookson, himself a clergyman, destined him for the Anglican clergy, and as late as May 1792 the poet could write, ‘it is at present my intention to take orders in the approaching winter or spring. My Uncle the Clergyman will furnish me with a title.’1 In Wordsworth’s time at St. John’s College, Cambridge, chapel attendance was mandatory; Roman Catholics and Nonconformists were still excluded, although in the early nineteenth century a wave of evangelicalism swept over the university. Most of Wordsworth’s acquaintances at St. John’s became Anglican clergymen, including his best friend, Robert Jones, who was his companion at the time of the important experiences described in Book VI of The Prelude (going over the Simplon Pass) and at the opening of Book XIV (climbing Snowdon).
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Notes and References
WL, I, p. 76. To William Mathews, 19 May [1792]. In 1798 Christopher, Wordsworth’s youngest brother, became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1820 was elected Master of Trinity. In Wordsworth’s ‘Natural Methodism’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), Richard E. Brantley takes up Wordsworth’s indebtedness to Evangelical Anglicanism and argues with some cogency that he was at least as much Methodist as Anglican in his sensibility. For Brantley Wordsworth is fundamentally a Christian poet. So he becomes also for John A. Hodgson, who in Wordsworth’s Philosophical Poetry, 1797–1814 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980) finds that ‘more and more after’ 1805 Wordsworth ‘modifies his metaphysical assumptions’, arriving finally at ‘something very like the God of Christianity’ (p. xvi). No one can deny Wordsworth’s powerful expression of pantheist or near-pantheist belief during the great decade, 1798–1807. But we wish to stress, against much current thinking, both the pervasiveness and the durability of his Christian background. Still an excellent commentary on Wordsworth’s religious beliefs is Stopford A. Brooke’s Theology in the English Poets: Cowper — Coleridge — Wordsworth and Burns (1874).
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974) I, pp. 41, 37, 45. This is not to deny that Wordsworth’s prefaces and poems are filled with his faith in the natural goodness of the human heart and that he often sings of such goodness and virtue (e.g., Prelude, XIII, 11. 182–5).
On this point, see Carl Woodring, Wordsworth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965) p. 113.
Henry Crabb Robinson, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Etc., ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester University press, 1922) p. 15. In the passages reprinted in this book, Crabb Robinson enables us to gain a vivid sense of how Blake and Wordsworth responded to each other in conversation.
See also Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Morley, 3 vols (London: Dent, 1938) I, p. 327.
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© 1983 John Clubbe and the Estate of Ernest J. Lovell, Jr
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Clubbe, J., Lovell, E.J. (1983). Wordsworth: the Blakean Response. In: English Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06726-8_3
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