Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility

Introduction: Williams and Wordsworth, an
Odyssey
While still a schoolboy, William Wordsworth, as most Wordsworthians
know, was already somewhat enamoured of Helen Maria Williams.
He expressed his admiration for the poet and her sensibility in his first
published poem—Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep
at a tale of distress—on which poem and its significance, I will dilate
briefly in Chapter 2. Their stories are considerably more intertwined
than that, however. This little book will argue that Williams’s work
had a greater influence on Wordsworth’s poetical development than
she is generally given credit for, and that Wordsworth’s loyalty to the
kind of writing her Poems in Two Volumes (1786) helped to inspire in
him is one of the primary reasons for the acrimonious reception of his
own Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). It will also claim that her work
is a major, if not the major, influence on the great poem of the nineteenth
century, The Prelude. In short, while this book has no discoveries
to announce about their connections, it does seek to re-assess
the significance of Williams to Wordsworth, both as a poet of the Age
of Sensibility, and as a writer of a compendiouis eye-witness history
of the great event of the age, an event formative in both of their lives.
On 13 July 1790, as all Wordsworthians know, Wordsworth
and Robert Jones arrived in Calais ‘on the eve of that great federal
day’, the festival that was to mark the first anniversary of the
French Revolution. Helen Maria Williams, on that day, was already
in Paris. Indeed she had a grand-stand seat in the Champ de Mars,
to witness what she called ‘the most sublime spectacle which, perhaps,
was ever represented on the theatre of this earth’. Her description
of Louis XIV and 600,000 spectators saying the national oath
together begins the first of some fifteen volumes of contemporary
history, volumes that would be cannibalized repeatedly, in the three