This really is a very good book. Snow is among those rare English Faculty scholars who know what they are talking about when they write about religion. In one sense the words ‘William Wordsworth’ in the title could be superfluous for what Snow has produced is an absolutely excellent concise history of the theologies of poverty in the mainstream Church of England and various traditions dissenting from it (primarily Methodist and Quaker – although she takes great care to chronicle Church of England Evangelicals); but yet the name is not superfluous because she narrates this through careful primary source work – through Dorothy Wordsworth's journals and William's early poetry. This work is filled with nearly immaculate archival work detailing quantitative analysis of how both Methodists and Quakers took care of their poor, and equally precise data on the workhouse solution that the national Church provided. Furthermore, she only ever includes material from either of the Wordsworths when it is absolutely precisely relevant to her analysis of the larger question of the theologies of poverty. In other words, the argument is never forced onto a particular text – many practitioners of literary criticism could learn from her methodology. If I have the reviewer's necessary carp at this book it might be that she spends too much time in her final chapter (a close reading of ‘The excursion’) establishing Rousseau's Emile as a substantive influence, but she is fighting the critical heritage and she needs to substantiate her rhetorical basis before proceeding, but to my mind it distracts from her excellent close reading of the poem. I would have liked to see a formal polemical conclusion of perhaps five to eight pages (rather than a one page ‘epilogue’ incorporated into the end of chapter v); this would have made a strong work even stronger. If those are the only two ‘criticisms’ of the book that I care to mention, I suspect that my readers will discern just how much I think of it.