Gothic Wordsworth

Abstract

If Wordsworth has not come down to us as one of the great Gothic writers of the 1790s – the heyday of the ‘genre’ – it was not for the want of trying. Prior to 1798, and the appearance of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s main publications were An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, poems which include ‘social Gothic’, as David Simpson puts it.¹ But he also strove hard to bring out Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers, works fundamentally conditioned by the conventions of terror writing.² Lyrical Ballads embraced the Gothic, although partitioned, with Coleridge producing the supernatural poems whereas Wordsworth’s ‘subjects were to be chosen from everyday life’ (BL: II, 7). By the time of the second edition of 1800, the Gothic, like Coleridge, had become exiguous. The quotidian predominated, presided over by the lofty strain of ‘Tintern Abbey’. Critics have conventionally seen Wordsworth’s abandonment of the Gothic as the natural consequence of his maturation, the letting go of a mode Wordsworth himself identified as belonging to his ‘juvenalia’.³ If this perception has dimmed to the degree that Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers have been reassessed as significant productions of the poet’s decade of genius, it has yet to be fully rectified by a recognition that these are, indeed, deeply Gothic works. Wordsworth himself was complicit in this great forgetting when, in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads he further consolidated his inward turn towards the lyric mode with a full frontal assault on the Gothic as popular works – mass entertainments – calculated to rot the reader’s mind.