‘The Anglican establishment did not speak to his condition.’ Photo: Portrait of William Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842
‘Summoned, roused, constrained’: Jonathan Wooding on the ‘Quakerish predisposition’ of William Words
‘It is fit for the unchurched, post-truth, twenty-first century pilgrim.’
In 1925, a long revolutionary poem, composed in the years leading up to 1805, was published in England for the first time. Its composer had died in 1850. A pale version of this poem had been published earlier, and it was greeted by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), a historian and former government secretary at war, none too calmly: ‘It is to the last degree Jacobinical, indeed Socialist. I understand perfectly why Wordsworth did not choose to publish it in his lifetime.’ This long poem, addressed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is now referred to as The 1805 Prelude, and is, for this reader at least, to the last degree, Quakerish.
