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Three feet on the ground

Marilyn Butler, 7 July 1983

William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision 
by Jonathan Wordsworth.
Oxford, 496 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 19 812097 4
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William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness 
by David Pirie.
Methuen, 301 pp., £14.95, March 1982, 0 416 31300 0
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Benjamin the Waggoner 
by William Wordsworth, edited by Paul Betz.
Cornell/Harvester, 356 pp., £40, September 1981, 0 85527 513 8
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... the end never incorporated into a finished poem; the poet, says Jonathan Wordsworth, could only be William Wordsworth. It seems wholly true, and Wordsworthianness is very well brought out in the discussion that follows – a sensitive, lucid, light prose-paraphrase which includes the reflection that ‘hairs’ is much better than ‘hair’ would have ...

Narcissus and Cain

David Bromwich, 6 August 1992

Mary and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft, Matilda by Mary Shelley 
edited by Janet Todd.
Pickering & Chatto, 217 pp., £24.95, January 1992, 1 85196 023 6
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Lady Sophia Sternheim 
by Sophie von La Roche, edited by James Lynn.
Pickering & Chatto, 216 pp., £24.95, January 1992, 9781851960217
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... snatches the baby from the heroine, who is now a stand-in for the author herself. Her own husband, Godwin, was right to concede that there were actions of Wollstonecraft’s life in which her conduct could not be defended. He was pardonably hopeful in guessing that her novels might carry interest for readers who knew nothing about her life. Their daughter Mary ...

At the Museum of London

Peter Campbell: Artists’ studios, 7 June 2001

... seeming to imply that Belgravian stucco isn’t honest enough for an artist. The house E.W. Godwin built for Whistler in Tite Street was as aesthetically sophisticated as Whistler’s own paintings – he had to sell it when the costs of the Ruskin libel trial ruined him.Changes of address mirror changes in status. The guild practices of the ...

Tousy-Mousy

Anne Barton: Mary Shelley, 8 February 2001

Mary Shelley 
by Miranda Seymour.
Murray, 665 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7195 5711 9
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Mary Shelley in Her Times 
edited by Betty Bennett and Stuart Curran.
Johns Hopkins, 311 pp., £33, September 2000, 0 8018 6334 1
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Mary Shelley's Fictions 
edited by Michael Eberle-Sinatra.
Palgrave, 250 pp., £40, August 2000, 0 333 77106 0
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... always attracted far less attention than those during which the 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin eloped spectacularly with Shelley from Godwin’s London house to the Continent, came back to confront debt and estrangement from her father, then – established once more in Switzerland with Shelley – began ...

Wordsworth’s Lost Satire

Nicholas Roe, 6 July 1995

... was less squeamish. He retained a manuscript of the poem until May 1822, when he approached William Blackwood seeking publication of ‘some splendid fragments’ to which he had contributed as ‘a very humble adjunct’ to the principal author: ‘a Friend of mine who now ranks in the very foremost of the poetical world’. Writing again two weeks ...

Prophet of the Past

Oliver Cussen: Blame it on Malthus, 26 September 2024

The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History 
by Deborah Valenze.
Yale, 254 pp., £45, July 2023, 978 0 300 24613 1
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... Exhibition of 1851 encouraged Victorians to embrace material gratification without guilt than William Stanley Jevons began to warn of the imminent exhaustion of the nation’s coal supply. Drawing explicitly on Malthus, Jevons argued that the increased demand on resources from a growing population was forcing mines into deeper and more inaccessible ...

Why did they lose?

Tom Shippey: Why did Harold lose?, 12 March 2009

The Battle of Hastings: The Fall of Anglo-Saxon England 
by Harriet Harvey Wood.
Atlantic, 257 pp., £17.99, November 2008, 978 1 84354 807 2
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... is that the wrong side won on 14 October 1066: Anglo-Saxon England was more civilised than William’s Normandy. William had no moral or legal claim to the throne. Harold, by contrast, was the last English king for more than 600 years to owe his crown ‘to the will of the people’. ...

Men in Love

Paul Delany, 3 September 1987

Women in Love 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen.
Cambridge, 633 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 521 23565 0
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The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Vol. IV, 1921-24 
edited by Warren Roberts, James Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
Cambridge, 627 pp., £35, May 1987, 0 521 23113 2
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... In the summer of 1918 Lawrence probably consummated his infatuation with the Cornish farmer, William Hocking; then, just as he was putting the finishing touches on Women in Love, came his involvement with the failing marriage of Godwin and Rosalind Baynes. Lawrence wrote Godwin...

Awfully Present

Thomas Jones: The Tambora Eruption, 5 February 2015

Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World 
by Gillen D’Arcy Wood.
Princeton, 293 pp., £19.95, April 2014, 978 0 691 15054 3
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... the poppy cultivation in Yunnan, for example, is introduced with an account of her sister Fanny Godwin’s death by opium overdose. In the summer of 1816 – or rather, between the months of May and September, since 1816 was the ‘year without a summer’ – Shelley and Mary Godwin (they married six months later), their ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... or at least filled with the dying, he began to collect remains, and had those of his grandparents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, transported from St Pancras Old Church in London to the cemetery of St Mary’s in Bournemouth, where they lie today with his mother, Mary.After a number of ‘thundering influenzas’ late in 1884, the warmer months ...

Highway to Modernity

Colin Kidd: The British Enlightenment, 8 March 2001

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World 
by Roy Porter.
Allen Lane, 728 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7139 9152 6
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... overtly radical concerns with reform and social progress in the later era of Price, Priestley, Godwin and Bentham. Along the way, Porter paints a vivid panorama of the social underpinnings: the world of print culture, press freedom, religious toleration, educational reform and practical improvement. At this level, the book is an undoubted ...

Suicidal Piston Device

Susan Eilenberg: Being Lord Byron, 5 April 2007

Imposture 
by Benjamin Markovits.
Faber, 200 pp., £10.99, January 2007, 978 0 571 23332 8
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... origins. It was published by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine under Byron’s name. John William Polidori, Byron’s former physician, claimed it as his own and threatened a lawsuit to recover the rights to it; Byron disclaimed authorship. The magazine promised to correct its error and to compensate Polidori, but the correction was botched and the ...

Balloons and Counter-Balloons

Susan Eilenberg: ‘The Age of Wonder’, 7 January 2010

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science 
by Richard Holmes.
HarperPress, 380 pp., £9.99, September 2009, 978 0 00 714953 7
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... the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became ...

Shelley in Season

Richard Holmes, 16 October 1980

The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics 
by P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 312 pp., £16.50, June 1980, 0 19 812095 8
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Shelley and his World 
by Claire Tomalin.
Thames and Hudson, 128 pp., £5.95, July 1980, 9780500130681
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... the new concept of the ‘democratic revolution’, with its French and American antecedents – Godwin, of course, Tom Paine, Francis Burdett, Cartwright and, interestingly, William Hazlitt. Throughout, Dr Dawson pays Shelley the tribute – a rare one, as it would certainly have been in the days before the pioneering ...

Shee Spy

Michael Dobson, 8 May 1997

The Secret Life of Aphra Behn 
by Janet Todd.
Deutsch, 545 pp., £25, October 1996, 0 233 98991 9
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... she certainly undertook such a mission to Antwerp, where she contacted a Cromwellian exile called William Scot, offering him a pardon in exchange for information on alleged Dutch plans to invade England with the help of other banished republicans. (Hence her routine description in literature textbooks as ‘playwright and spy’.) After this paradoxically ...

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