Volume 46, Number 1 · January 14, 1999
The Mysterious Mr. Wordsworth
By Anne Barton
Wordsworth and the Victorians
by Stephen Gill
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 346 pp., $45.00
The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy
by Kenneth R. Johnston
Norton, 965 pp., $45.00
When Shelley, in Peter Bell the Third, satirized the Wordsworth of 1819 as a political turncoat, a conservative who formerly 'wrote for freedom,' and also a constitutionally 'solemn and unsexual man,' indeed a kind of 'male prude,' there were a number of things he did not know. Shelley was aware, like everyone else, that Wordsworth in his youth—along with Coleridge and Southey—had not been a Tory, and had radical sympathies. Just how radical he never learned.
Review, 5720 words
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