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Structure and Meaning in The Prelude, Book v

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Joel Morkan
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Abstract

Although most critics have registered disappointment with Book v of Wordsworth's Prelude, a reading of that part of the epic in the light of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century educational theory reveals that in it Wordsworth made a supremely unified and significant poetic statement. Such a reading of Book v demonstrates that Wordsworth feared that the overly manipulative systems of contemporary educational theorists would sever children from the sources of their imaginative growth. The Book shows that Wordsworth believed, in contrast with most contemporary educational theorists, that freedom and spontaneity were the sources of the imagination. If the childhood of humanity were deprived of the freedom necessary for imaginative growth, human culture, so important to man's earthly existence, would wither and die. In Book VWordsworth took a stand against what he thought was an overwhelming contemporary evil. If we read Book v in its proper intellectual context, the structural and conceptual integrity that previous critics have missed becomes apparent.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 2 , March 1972, pp. 246 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 The Mind of a Poet, ii (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins Press, 1941), 376.

2 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 225–33.

3 “A Reading of The Prelude, Book v,” MLQ, 24 (1963), 366.

4 All citations are from the 1850 text, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton, 1965).

5 The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1963), pp. 5–6.

6 “Wordsworth: A Minority Report,” Wordsworth Centenary Studies, ed. G. T. Dunklin (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 3–22.

7 A number of books treat the interest in education during the period; among the useful are Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education (London : Laurence & Wishart, 1960); J. W. Ashley Smith, The Birth of Modern Education (London: Independent Press, 1954); and S. J. Curtis, His tory of Education in Great Britain (London: University Tutorial Press, 1948). Moreover, in The Use of the Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), William Walsh has explored the Romantics' concern with education. Although he does not treat Book v nor examine the general current of ideas on education in the nineteenth century, he does have some suggestive things to say about Wordsworth's ideas on the growth of the mind (pp. 30–51).

8 Z. S. Fink, The Early Wordsworthian Milieu (Oxford: Clarendon 1958), p. 93; George Wilbur Meyer, Wordsworth's Formative Years (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1943), p. 5.

9 “Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Wedgwood Fund,” BNYPL, 60 (1956), 425–43; 487–507.

10 John Locke on Education, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), p. 20.

11 Essays on Practical Education, i (London: H. Reynell, 1811), iv.

12 Locke, p. 72.

13 Edgeworth, i, 384.

14 Educational Theory, trans, and ed. Edward Franklin Buchner (London: Lippincott, 1904), pp. 180–81.

15 Kant, p. 174.

16 Edgeworth, II, 286.

17 What is more significant to the present study, however, is that Mrs. Barbauld and many of the other people involved in promulgating educational ideas which were abhorrent to Wordsworth were either his personal friends or people whose talents he regarded. His estimation of Mrs. Barbauld was, for instance, quite high (see Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith Morley, London: Dent, 1938, i, 8). The fact that he thought well of many of these people while disagreeing with their ideas may account for the generalized nature of his satire in Book v.

18 Edgeworth, ii, 327.

19 Emile, trans. Rosalie Feltenstein (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950), p. 16.

20 P. 42.

21 The Minor Educational Writings of Rousseau, trans, and ed. William Boyd (New York : Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), p. 40.

22 Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Elisabeth Schneider (New York: Holt, 1966), pp. 94–95.

23 It is interesting to note how closely Wordsworth's satiric portrait parallels Godwin's satiric description of the education of the Prince. Godwin wrote: “What is the education of a prince? Its first quality is extreme tenderness. The winds of heaven are not permitted to blow upon him. He is dressed and undressed by his lacqueys and valets. His wants are carefully anticipated ; his desire, without any effort of his, profusely supplied. His health is of too much importance to the community, to permit him to exert any considerable effort either of body or mind. He must not hear the voice of reprimand or blame. In all things it is first of all to be remembered, that he is a prince, that is, some rare and precious creature, but not of human kind.” Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1946) II, 12–13. Wordsworth's portrait has none of the radical political implications of Godwin's. Godwin was, in fact, a member of the opposing camp; however, the two satiric portraits share the same condemnatory tone, they both berate the educational system they are assaulting for excluding nature from the educational process, and finally accuse that system of producing an inhuman product. Although, by the time he wrote The Prelude, Wordsworth had moved far from Godwin's politics, he continued to maintain his antipathy to the systematic manipulation of human beings.