Abstract
The full title of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Simon Lee’, published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798, is ‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman, with an incident in which he was concerned’. That reference to an ‘incident’ may lead us to expect something which, after a lengthy description of the Old Huntsman’s previously active life and present decrepit condition, Wordsworth tells us he is not going to provide:
My gentle reader, I perceive
How patiently you’ve waited,
And I’m afraid that you expect
Some tale will be related.
O reader! Had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! You would find
A tale in everything.
What more I have to say is short,
I hope you’ll kindly take it;
It is no tale; but should you think,
Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.1
(lines 69–80)
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Notes
Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, the Text of the 1798 Edition with the Additional 1800 Poems and the Prefaces, ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones, London: Methuen, 1963. All references to the poems and Prefaces will be to this edition.
David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 55–6.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 265.
William Godwin, ‘Enquiry into Political Justice’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols, London: William Pickering, 1993, vol. IV, p. 81.
Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words, London: D.I. Eaton, 1795
See Corinna Wagner, ‘Symbolic Performances, Public Contests: Negotiating Politics in the 1790s’, British Association of Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review, 23, March 2003, pp. 11–14.
see John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–6, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000;
Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Mark Philp, ‘Revolution’, in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 17–25
Marilyn Butler, ‘Revolving in Deep Time: The French Revolution as Narrative’, in The French Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, eds Keith Hanley and Raman Seiden, London: Harvester, 1990, pp. 1–22.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 202.
See Donald Ault, Narrative Unbound: Re-visioning William Blake’s ‘The Four Zoas’, New York: Station Hill Press, 1987, p. xi.
See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions: The American and French Cases in British Perspective’, Government and Opposition, xxiv, 1989, 81–105
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. C.C. O’Brien, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 56.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 93.
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 9.
See Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995;
Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, London: Palgrave, 2002.
Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems, Brighton: Harvester, 1979, p. 5.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review, xxiv, September 1796, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds M. Butler and J. Todd, London: Pickering, 1991, vol. 1, p. 467.
Watkin Tench, Letters from Revolutionary France, ed. Gavin Edwards, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001, p. 81.
Gavin Edwards, ‘From Chester to Quimper via Sydney: Watkin Tench in Revolutionary France’, Literature and History, 11, 2, 2002, pp. 1–18.
Deirdre Coleman, ‘Chronicler of Two New Societies’, Southerly, 63, 1, 2003, pp. 206–10 (208).
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Jonathan Rée, ‘Bound to be in the wrong’, London Review of Books, 20 January 2005, pp. 20–2.
Galen Stawson, ‘Tales of the Unexpected’, Guardian Review, 10 January 2004, p. 15.
Louis Mink, ‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’, New Literary History, vol. 1, 1970, pp. 541–58 (557).
Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: A Study in Spatial History, London: Faber, 1986, p. 309.
See also, Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, London and New York: Routledge, 1990;
Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, Harmondsworth: Allan Lane, 2002, p. 411.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 36.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956, pp. 189–230.
See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988, pp. 58–9.
Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984, p. 3.
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
Gavin Edwards, George Crabbe’s Poetry on Border Land, Lampeter and Lewiston: Edwin Meilen Press, 1990, pp. 77–144.
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© 2006 Gavin Edwards
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Edwards, G. (2006). Narrative Order. In: Narrative Order, 1789–1819. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502246_1
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