"Wandering in Fact and Fiction: Wordsworth´s Wanderer and Christopher Thomson"

Abstract

Discussing Wordsworth’s poem “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” Geoffrey Tillotson writes that “Goody herself . . . could not have given a more telling account of her way of life” (7). I wonder. Goody Blake, like other cottagers, had ample time to think, spinning days away in a house by herself. She may have participated more fully in the life of her community than Wordsworth did and therefore been able to comment more fully on the daily and yearly rituals, the shared ethos, and solitary decisions that make up a “way of life” in a particular place. But, as Wordsworth himself writes, the “Strongest minds / Are often those of which the noisy world / Hears least” (Excursion, book 1, lines 95–97). We would never dream of teaching an introduction to Romanticism class with works about women but none by them, but our representation of laboring-class people in the Romantic period has largely been left to leisure-class authors. By obscuring the impoverished authors of the period, we have impoverished our understanding of the period itself. For many undergraduates, Goody Blake, Simon Lee, and their poor but virtuous kin supply the only images of Romantic-period working-class life.