Abstract
Wordsworth was eager to see Paris, and stayed there for five days at the beginning of December. He sought places to which the Revolution had given éclat (including the site of the Bastille, the Faubourg St Antoine, and the Champ de Mars), heard ‘hissing factionists’ in public places, and attended stormy meetings at the National Assembly and the Jacobin Club. As in London, his interest was that of a sight-seer and student of humanity; nothing in the political scene impressed as much, he afterwards maintained, as Le Brun’s popular ‘Magdalene’ picture.
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Notes
Wordsworth was on his way to his ‘father’s house’ (PR.23, app.cnt.), probably in the summer of 1781, when his elder brother was ill at Hawkshead. On 1 July Mr Cookson’s servant paid the Hawkshead accounts, and William probably accompanied him late in the afternoon on his return journey to Penrith, before being taken to Cockermouth. See Mary Wedd, ‘Wordsworth’s Stolen Boat’, The Wordsworth Circle, XI. 4, Autumn 1980.
T. W. Thompson (ed. R. Woof), Wordsworth’s Hawkshead, London, 1970, pp. 211–15.
B. R. Schneider, Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education, Cambridge, 1957, pp. 166, 171.
F. M. Todd, Politics and the Poet, A Study of Wordsworth, London, 1957, pp. 221–5.
Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, The Early Years, Oxford, 1957, p. 115n.
See H. D. Rawnsley, A Coach-Drive at the Lakes, Keswick, 1902, pp. 9–10.
See the illustration to the article by Mary Jacobus in Jonathan Wordsworth (ed.), Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, Ithaca and London, 1970, opp. p. 238.
The phrase is used by Wordsworth in ‘To the Moon (Rydal)’, 1835, but with a moralizing, not a spiritual, significance.
Douglas Bush, Science and English Poetry, New York, 1950, p. 83.
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© 1984 F. B. Pinion
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Pinion, F.B. (1984). France, Annette, and Descriptive Poetry (1791–3). In: A Wordsworth Companion. Macmillan Literary Companions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05718-4_3
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