Abstract
During the first years when they kept house together, Dorothy and William Wordsworth seem to have organised the business of living on the principle that they would live as cheaply as possible, in any suitable place that might offer itself. By not setting up a permanent establishment they were free to move on when they wished; and in each place where they stayed they could undertake walks and expeditions which exposed them to the forces of nature and to chance human encounters. It was also, perhaps, a post-Godwinian experiment, aimed at demonstrating the possibility of living a life not bounded by conventional ties of marriage and family.1
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Notes
G. Burger, ‘The Chase’, and ‘William and Helen’, tr. W. Scott (1796), p. 14.
E. Darwin, Zoōnomia (1794–6), I 492–509. As Enid Welsford points out (Salisbury Plain (1966), p. 34), other thinkers of the time, such as Diderot, Robinet, and Priestley, had spoken of evolution as a purposeful development of the spirit of nature.
The question is further discussed by H. W. Piper (The Active Universe (1962) — see especially his Appendix A on Coleridge’s opinions) and, very fully in relation to Erasmus Darwin, by D. King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin (1963), pp. 63–96.
See above, pp. 82–91.
PW I 315–6; Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (1969) pp. 5–6.
Ibid., 64.
F. W. Bateson, Wordsworth: a Re-Interpretation (1954), pp. v, 143, 156–7.
D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913), Ch. vii, pp. 160–1.
Bateson, op. cit., p. 153.
See above, p. 104.
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© 1978 John Beer
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Beer, J. (1978). A Fountain Sealed. In: Wordsworth and the Human Heart. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08710-5_6
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