Abstract
This chapter turns from the “Gothic” politics of the Peninsular War to the “Gothic” terms of debate around national education, focusing particularly on the representation and continuation of that debate in the “something of a dramatic form” of Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814). I argue that the Lake Poets’ advocacy of Andrew Bell’s “Madras” system of pupil-tuition shows their “progressive Gothic politics” in action, connecting Wordsworth’s reactions to Bell and his own developing thoughts about education in texts such as the Reply to Mathetes (1809–10) back to the 1790s revolution controversy and the original social and educational mission of The Recluse. It is because Bell’s system was both appreciably national or “Gothic” in outward appearance and potentially socially progressive in underlying design that it was given such prominence in The Excursion, a poem that was, according to its preface, addressed to the “existing state of things,” and patterned upon a “gothic Church.”
Our education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics ... And after all, with the Gothic and monkish education (for such it is in the groundwork) we may put in our claim to as ample and as early a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature which have adorned the modern world, as any other nation in Europe.
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (87–8)
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Notes
- 1.
For Wordsworth’s withdrawal of his support for Bell’s system in the late 1820s, see LY I, 685–6, and II, 20; and Richardson (1994), 103–104. In January 1816 Wordsworth asked his brother Christopher to help William Johnson, the former master of Grasmere school and now (with Wordsworth’s recommendation) headmaster of Bell’s Central School in London, in a dispute with Bell. Wordsworth’s language is distinctly unflattering: he calls Bell a “jealous opponent” of Johnson, and the leader of a “Cabal” against him (MY I, 661–62, and II, 270–271).
- 2.
For Lancaster’s audience with George III, see Salmon (1932), viii–ix. For Lancaster on public spirit, see Lancaster (1805), 34, 94–96, 162. For Lancaster’s lectures, see a handbill for a lecture, “combining a practical representation of the ROYAL BRITISH SYSTEM OF EDUCATION with the details of its Theory,” to be given at 2 pm on Friday, June 1, 1805, “at the PANTHEON, Oxford Street” [British Library, shelf-mark 1879.c.11 (36)]. For Lancaster’s “humble petition,” see the manuscript pasted into the copy of Improvements (1805) held at the British Library, shelfmark 231. g. 17.
- 3.
The print is reproduced in my chapter, “Wordsworth’s Gothic Education,” in Parker ed. (2016).
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Duggett, T. (2022). Wordsworth’s Gothic Education: The Excursion. In: Gothic Romanticism. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96832-8_5
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