Epilogue

Abstract

In 1799, when agents from London’s Home Office put Wordsworth and Coleridge under surveillance to determine just how subversive the pair’s collaborative activities were, they not only gave us the colorful “Spy Nozy” story; they also voiced concern that there might be “a Press in the House” at Alfoxden.¹ By expressing apprehension regarding the possibility that a public press was at work in the domestic sphere, the agents pointed to the subversive potential of a household model of literary production. Furthermore, their report implicitly acknowledged that the literary family had emerged a major publishing force by the end of the eighteenth century.