Themes and Issues

Abstract

‘Autobiography’ is first recorded in English in 1797, so to Wordsworth it would have sounded as unfamiliar as that other recent invention, ‘psychology’. Nevertheless, several popular types of writing can be seen converging to produce the new form which The Prelude exemplifies. Spiritual journals, of which St Augustine’s Confessions was perhaps the first, and John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, a popular seventeenth-century version, offer the pattern of intense interior scrutiny and the alternation of confidence and despair which are also to be found in Wordsworth. Defoe’s use of the first-person narrator form to disguise his fictions for the Puritan market produced best-sellers: Robinson Crusoe, with its combination of lively narrative and brooding reflection, was an especial favourite of young Wordsworth.