Wordsworth's Political Writings

By: William Wordsworth

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This reading text of the four main political texts produced by William Wordsworth will enable readers who do not own the now rare and expensive Owen and Smyser edition of Wordsworth's Prose Works to follow the political peregrinations of a major poet who, as he said to Orville Dewey, an American visitor, gave twelve hours thought to social questions for each hour he devoted to poetry. The four texts included are the Jacobin A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), infused with the doctrines of Tom Paine; the liberal republican 'prose poem' The Convention of Cintra (1809), the Tory apologetics of Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland (1818), and the welfare-state philosophy of the 1835 Postscript in which Wordsworth married the Coleridgean concept of a society leavened by its 'clerisy' to a devastating critique of laissez-faire 'political economy'. These works are available in online form, as edited by Grosart, but this edition includes the invaluable and extensive editorial commentary by Owen & Smyser, which has been converted to easily accessible endnotes and longer excursus notes (which are included in the table of contents) for ease of use. W. J. B. Owen's scholarly work includes his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1957), Wordsworth as Critic (1969), Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism (1974) and his edition of The Fourteen-Book Prelude for the Cornell Wordsworth (1985). Jane Worthington Smyser is best known for her Wordsworth's Reading of Roman Prose (1946).