There can be no doubt that William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in his youth ardently supported the French Revolution. We know, moreover, from his retrospective account in The Prelude that he had hoped the principles animating the revolution would extend beyond France to England and indeed to “the whole Earth.”¹Nor can there be any doubt that, from about 1812 on, Wordsworth sympathized with the Tory cause and had become deeply influenced by the teachings of Edmund Burke. What has been much debated in Wordsworth criticism is exactly when this shift occurred. Until recently, the prevailing view has been that while Wordsworth became disenchanted with his earlier radicalism, he did not default on the liberal principles and in fact remained a committed liberal throughout his “great decade” (1798–1808).²According to this view, only after he had written his finest poetry did Wordsworth switch to the conservative side.

Within the past ten or fifteen years, however, a number of New Historicist critics have contended that as early as 1796 with The Borderers and certainly by the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth had been significantly influenced by the doctrines of Burke.³As a consequence of this influence and a growing disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution, they argue, Words-worth largely abandoned his desire for radical change in English society. According to this view, he retreated from a poetry of protest aimed at affecting material change in society (such as the eradication of poverty) to an interiorized poetry of nature and the imagination. In the infamous phraseology of Jerome McGann, “Between 1793 and 1798 Wordsworth lost the world merely to gain his own immortal soul.”⁴On the other hand, certain critics, directly or indirectly in response to the former critics, have attempted to save the radical Wordsworth.⁵That is, they attempt to show that Wordsworth maintained fairly radical ideals well into the nineteenth century. Against the latter critics I will argue that by the late 1790s (that is, from the beginning of the great decade) Wordsworth was indeed closer to Burke than to the revolutionaries in his politics, while against the former I will argue that Wordsworth did not in fact “lose the world,” but instead set more prudent goals and altered his proposed means for achieving those goals.

For Wordsworth, any attempt to influence actual and lasting social reform required serious attention to the health of the “immortal souls” both of those who would actuate and of those who would receive the benefits of social reform. Thus, whereas the Wordsworth of the first half of the 1790s had desired reform which was total and immediate—a cataclysmic upheaval and restructuring of society based on the French Revolutionary model with millennial hopes—the Wordsworth of the end of the 1790s had taken a view of reform that is long but not eschatological, one that takes into account the law of unforeseen consequences and recognizes limits to the possibilities of human reform, and of the dangers of attempting to exceed those limits. Consequently, while he was writing his greatest and most famous poetry, Wordsworth was already a prudent conservative in the Burkean sense.

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Although Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads is generally seen as a revolutionary doctrine—and in many ways it is—we can still detect in it the influence of Burke. James K. Chandler detects Burke’s influence on the Preface in Wordsworth’s denigration of the utility of reason and emphasis on the “taste” of the author, in the importance of habit for morality, and in the stress on experience.⁶To this might be added Wordsworth’s distrust of the abstract and stress on “flesh and blood,” his insistence on the empirical method of “look[ing] steadily at [his] subject,” and his acceptance of prejudice, or “honorable bigotry.”⁷

A careful perusal of the Preface also reveals that Wordsworth chose the rural poor as his subject matter not in order to reveal their privation and to call for its alleviation, but rather to demonstrate that they are actually the most suitable subject matter for good poetry. “Low and rustic life was generally chosen,” he says,

because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language. . . . ⁸

In other words, the poor serve his needs, not he theirs. In any case, the poverty that Wordsworth is most concerned with is spiritual not material. Not political oppression or economic exploitation, but a blunting of the powers of the mind is what Wordsworth considers the most significant problem of the age. This is a “general evil” of such a “magnitude” as to “oppress” Wordsworth with a justifiable “melancholy.” But Wordsworth remains optimistic in the natural strength of the human mind and in the belief in an emerging systematic opposition to this “evil . . . by men of greater powers” than himself.⁹

In spite of this, however, there can be no doubt that the Lyrical Ballads are revolutionary in the degree to and manner in which they treat the rural poor. Indeed, most contemporary reviewers took them to be low or vulgar, and some contemporaries even took them to be radical. And without question, the ballads—at least implicitly, by bringing to the reader’s attention the plight of the poverty-stricken—call for some sort of reform in the treatment of the poor. But the question remains: Just what sort of reform? We must keep in mind that it is altogether possible for poetic form and content to be revolutionary, while the views expressed by that form and content are conservative. As Wordsworth himself said to Charles Fox regarding their political and literary differences, “in poetry you must admit that I am the Whig and you the Tory.” This clearly indicates that Wordsworth can at least conceive of simultaneously being a political conservative and poetic revolutionary.¹⁰In order to qualify as Burkean reform the proposed plan must call for the organic modification rather than the fundamental altering of existing social arrangements; it must proceed gradually and cautiously so as not to cause civil unrest and create worse problems than it solves by destroying the stability and order upon which society stands; it must take into account all conceivable contingencies and hence cannot be based on an abstract blueprint drawn up by social engineers; and finally it must be possible, not utopian. The plan which Wordsworth does implicitly offer in the Lyrical Ballads is based on these Burkean premises, but goes one step further than Burke himself in regard to poor relief. That step specifically deals with those among the poor who slip through the cracks of the existing system, usually because a member of the upper class fails or is unable to perform his duties.

By 1798 Wordsworth seems to have developed a strong distrust for the “meddling intellects” of those economists and statesmen who thought that they could rationally solve all of society’s problems. For instance, in “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” a poem included in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth opposes those “political economists . . . [who] war upon mendacity in all its forms, and by implication, if not directly, on Almsgiving also.”¹¹For this reason, as David Simpson points out, few “have failed to register some measure of embarrassment or outrage at ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar.’”¹²But just what is the source of this outrage?

Chandler convincingly traces the influence of Burke on this poem.¹³Wordsworth’s main concern in this poem is that the beggar not be considered useless. But as Chandler points out, the beggar’s use aids not himself, but the villagers who live around him. Wordsworth’s main concern, in other words, is not with the indigent, but with those who are affected by the indigent. The presence of the beggar—and his continual need for charity—makes, to paraphrase Burke, a habit of the villagers’ virtue: “Where’er the aged Beggar takes his rounds,/ The mild necessity of use compels/ To acts of love; and habit does the work/ Of reason.” The second use of the beggar, Chandler adds, “is that he reminds the villagers of their kind offices toward him.” Like Burke, Wordsworth also castigates the presumption of statesmen “Who are so restless in [their] wisdom” and “have a broom still ready in [their] hands/ To rid the world of nuisances.” He advises these vain men to let the beggar be. Finally, Chandler also makes the important point that Wordsworth’s position has clearly shifted since 1793, when in the Letter to Llandaff he dares to hope that the “class of wretches called mendicants” will soon cease to exist.

David Simpson takes up Chandler’s argument, but while he admits the undeniable influence of Burke on this poem, he nevertheless tries to save Wordsworth as much as possible from a position which he believes indicates “some moral shortcoming.”¹⁴He does so by maintaining that Wordsworth’s main polemic is not pro-Burke, but anti-Bentham. By defending charity against Bentham, however, Wordsworth more or less inadvertently falls into the conservative camp, denying the need of public relief. Simpson maintains, in any case, that “Wordsworth is far more subtle than Burke.” Moreover, in his haste to counter Bentham, Wordsworth merely slips into an ideological confusion. Simpson therefore claims that the “Burkean affiliations of this poem, while they are surely there, are not its major argument.”

While I do not deny the anti-Benthamite polemic in “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” I do think Simpson underestimates the degree of conscious Burkeanism present in the poem. As we saw in Chandler’s reading, there are more similarities to Burke than just an implicit denial of the need for poor relief. There is the emphasis on charity and habit, the distrust of meddling politicians, and also the clear shift from Wordsworth’s own earlier position. But just how much “saving” does Wordsworth need anyway? Chandler is as uncomfortable with the implications of his own reading as Simpson is, but just how much of a “moral shortcoming” should we ascribe to Wordsworth because of this poem?

I think the embarrassment and the outrage directed at this poem stem mostly from liberal misapprehensions about the basis of Wordsworth’s thinking on this matter. Simpson clearly is no subtle reader of Burke. More significantly, he never considers Burke’s argument, based on sound economic policy, that public relief, in the long run, would actually harm the poor.¹⁵But perhaps the best way to understand this issue in Wordsworth’s poem is not through Simpson, but through Harold Bloom’s warning that “Wordsworth is not preaching the vicious and mad doctrine that beggary is good because it makes charity possible.”¹⁶Bloom drastically oversimplifies the issue here. It is not simply that beggary ought to be kept around so that charity might continue to exist; charity (in the general sense of love for the other, caritas), no doubt, does not require the existence of indigence to be performed. Rather, by 1798, Wordsworth, I think, is working under the assumption that the poor will always be among us. We live inescapably in “a world/ Where want and sorrow” are. He has lost his earlier idealistic faith that poverty can be completely eliminated. But if it must exist, Words-worth implicitly argues, it is better that it be taken care of at the local levels through charity, than by some remote statesman who presumes to consider the beggar a burden on the community that must be eradicated. Some good benefit, Words-worth says, thankfully does accrue to beggary. If Providence—“the benignant law of Heaven” (167)—necessitates poverty for some, it also allows a measure of good to come of it. Charity reminds us of our moral equality. The French Revolution revealed the dangers of material levelling, but even “the poorest poor” are occasionally capable of charitable acts, which remind us that “we have all of us one human heart.” Contrarily, if the government takes care of poor relief, no charitable action with its attendant benefits is involved. Moreover, human nature being what it is, if relief is made an entitlement to which all have a right, Wordsworth knew, the ranks of the poor will only increase.¹⁷Thus we must not confuse Wordsworth’s support of private charity against public aid with a naïve optimism in the general altruism of humankind, or with a callous indifference to the actual suffering of the poor. Indeed, we could just as easily accuse the advocates of systematic public relief of a naïve belief in the efficacy of governmental regulations to alleviate poverty, or of an imprudent shortsightedness in failing to recognize the harmful long-term consequences of making relief an entitlement of the poor.

In contrast to “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” critics often hold up “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” as an example of Wordsworth’s concern for social reform. This ballad relates the tale of a poor old woman who steals sticks from a wealthy man’s hedge for fuel during the winter. When Harry Gill catches Goody Blake in the act of stealing the fuel, she curses him and he is immediately struck with a chill which remains with him for the rest of his life. The poem ends by admonishing other farmers to remember the story of Goody Blake and Harry Gill. Certainly, Words-worth does not endorse things as they are in this poem. But what sort of reform does “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” suggest is needed?