The Prose Works of William Wordsworth - Humanities-Ebooks

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The Prose Works of William Wordsworth because of its connection with An Unpublished Tour, a prose work now published for the first time, it might be maintained that the Memoir should be included in this edition. But we have held fast to our principle of not republishing notes to poems. Had we made an exception of the Memoir, we would have been hard pressed to find grounds for excluding other long notes to the poetry. For similar reasons we have not attempted to include in this edition Wordsworth’s marginalia. Another omission is far from intentional. In May 1838, in a letter to Daniel Stuart, formerly the editor of the Courier, Wordsworth listed poems and prose contributions which he had published in several journals; among them was ‘one article which I was induced to publish in a London newspaper, when Southey and Byron were at war’ (L.Y., p. 942). An extensive search has so far failed to uncover for us this lost article. All that we have found is a corroborating allusion in the Literary Gazette of 19 January 1822; before reprinting in full Southey’s letter of 11 January to the Courier, the Gazette gives a burlesque account of the ‘fight’ between Southey and Byron and lists, among a series of episodes, an intervention by the ‘Leach-gatherer’. No details of place or date are given. Alert to possibilities of other uncollected prose, we have, nevertheless, not systematically sought for a mysterious essay once mentioned by Hazlitt. In the course of praising Burke’s prose style, Hazlitt made an aside: ‘I remember Coleridge assuring me … that Wordsworth had written an Essay on Marriage, which, for manly thought and nervous expression, he deemed incomparably superior’ (The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1931), xii. 228). We have met no other reference to such an essay and rather suspect that, if Hazlitt’s recollection is accurate, Coleridge was swelling the corpus of Wordsworth’s writing, as he sometimes swelled his own. The texts of our edition, whether of works published by Wordsworth or of works left unpublished in manuscript, are, with one exception, the last to have been corrected by him. The exception is the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, which is here published in two versions on facing pages, the first edition of 1800 and the last edition of 1850. Throughout the whole of our edition, variants, both from manuscripts and earlier editions, are preserved in textual notes and occasionally in longer appendices. The last versions to be corrected by Wordsworth have been adopted as the main texts not only because of the great importance which he attached ‘to following strictly the last Copy of the text of an Author’ (L.Y., p. 473), but also because of the kinds of revisions that are peculiar to his prose. In the case of unpublished manuscripts, the last corrected version provides In this electronic edition the decision whether to display the pages side by side or alternately is for the reader to make: the viewing toolbar allows for both [RG].
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth almost invariably the only coherent and clearly intelligible text, for earlier versions are little more than fragmentary rough drafts, with numerous deletions and rewritings. In the case of published works, with the exception just mentioned, Wordsworth did not alter the main arguments of his prose or contradict the original spirit and intent. He merely corrected misprints and factual errors, made stylistic improvements, clarified ambiguous statements, and expanded earlier texts or added new sections. (On the rare occasions when an error was introduced into the final text, we relegate it to the textual apparatus and print instead the most recent correct version.) In separate introductions we describe in detail not only the various manuscripts but also any departures from our standard procedure in editing them. Here it is only necessary to set forth briefly a few of the principles governing our editorial practice: we preserve the manuscript spellings and abbreviations, with all their inconsistencies; where the manuscript lacks pointing, we silently insert it for the sake of intelligibility, but wherever we alter a mark of punctuation, we record that alteration in a textual note; although we have endeavoured to preserve all deletions, we have not recorded the striking out and the immediate rewriting of identical words and phrases; we have also not recorded transpositions within a sentence of identical words, phrases, and clauses, and only rarely have we recorded the fact that some of the text was inserted, usually by means of a caret, at the very moment of composition. A table of sigla used in the textual notes will be found on p. 11. Our general introductions are concerned primarily with defining the date, occasion, and background of the particular work, and we have usually refrained from comment on its literary qualities. In our commentaries where we quote or cite the poetry of any major English poet without referring to a specific edition, we are using the edition of his work in the series known as the Oxford Standard Authors. Otherwise, works frequently cited are identified in the list of abbreviations. For permission to publish manuscripts of Wordsworth’s prose and other related manuscripts, we are indebted to the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Cornell University Library, Harvard University Library, Northwestern University Library, and Yale University Library. The specific manuscripts of these libraries are all identified and described in subsequent introductions appropriate to them. But it should be added here that the numbering of the manuscripts in the Wordsworth Library at Grasmere, both those which we edit and those to which we briefly refer, is what will some day, no doubt, be called ‘Old Style’. New numbers were assigned to all the manuscripts after this edition had gone into page proof, but scholars seeking to ex-
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Page 3 and 4: Contents Preface to the Electronic
Page 5 and 6: Preface to the Electronic Edition T
Page 7: Preface to the First Edition WHEN,
Page 11 and 12: The Prose Works of William Wordswor
Page 13 and 14: Abbreviations Abrams M. H. Abrams,
Page 19 and 20: 1. Early Prose Fragments

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