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William Wordsworth is usually remembered as the quintessential Victorian Poet Laureate: a dull, worthy establishment figure, with impeccable middle-class, Tory, Anglican credentials, whose moralistic poetry has been required reading for generations of school children. Yet there is more to Wordsworth than "Daffodils" and "The Prelude". This selection of letters and autobiographical fragments introduces us to the real Wordsworth: the rebellious schoolboy, who vandalized his family portraits, became a supporter of the French Revolution and fathered an illegitimate daughter in France; the radical poet whose flouting of the conventions of the day attracted the ridicule of reviewers and forced him to endure 30 years of rejection, obscurity and financial hardship before achieving belated critical and popular success; the devoted brother, husband and father who could still write passionate love letters to his wife after ten years of marriage and the birth of five children; and finally, the revered patriarch whose poetry influenced a generation, whose opinions were sought by writers, politicians, churchmen and educationalists throughout the English-speaking world, but who thought nothing of vaulting walls, skating on the Lakes or climbing Helvellyn even in his 70s.
book reviews
- Angela Leighton, Times Literary Supplement
“An enjoyable book, sympathetically selected and annotated, and making a fine companion to Juliet Barker’s biography . . . not to be missed ”
- Kate Chisholm, Sunday Telegraph
“Dr Barker’s judicious selection (and interweaving paragraphs) shows us Wordsworth the writer in a way not possible in a biography that seeks to explain the life as well . . . [it] allows us to hear the man himself”
- Adam Sisman, The Literary Review
“Works surprisingly well . . . These letters also give us domestic details of a type too insubstantial to be noticed in a biography, but nevertheless charming . . . it makes a good story”
- Andrew Motion, Financial Times
“Intense, shrewd . . . The book’s main attraction . . . is something more diffuse: the general impression of Wordsworth as a recognisably decent, kind and likeable person”
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