The first half of the 19th century saw the emergence of
the world's first modern industrial nation, and the
transformation of England from a rural and agrarian to
an urban and industrial economy. These changes were
accompanied by an alteration in the relations between
the artist and society. Artistic activity of all kinds
comes to be regarded as apart from, and fundamentally
opposed to, the material and spiritual characteristics
of the new order. The so-called Industrial Novels of
the 1840s and '50s, along with some other closely
related works, reflect this displacement of the artist
from the central economic endeavour of the na tion ,
offering ideologically cautious, but imaginatively
highly charged statements of dissent from its perceived
drift.
In thus orienting themselves the authors of these
novels drew decisive inspiration from Wordsworth. His
Lyrical Ballads Preface is an early and influential
manifesto of political and cultural eccentricity,
offering a provisional analysis of the disparate
phenomena which consti tute the centre, or metropolis,
in English life. Many poems in the collection
originate novel strategies for circumscribing its
hegemony. This thesis aims to isolate Wordsworth's
contribution to this field, and to trace his influence
on three mid-19th-century novelists who address similar
issues: Mrs Gaskell, Emily Bronte and Charles Dickens.
The Introduction begins by examining the critical
reception of the Industrial Novels, and the wider
question of Wordsworth's reception by the Victorians.
It elaborates a spatial model of centricity and
eccentricity applicable both to Wordsworth and to the
novelists in question, pointing to the long historical
tradition of dissent locating itself in geographic and
economic margins. Finally, it focuses on the Lake
District, by far the most culturally significant of
these margins in the 19th century, recounting the
stages whereby its bearing on the problems of the new
urban-industrial society came to be widely acknowledged
along lines first proposed by Wordsworth.
Chapter 1 looks first at Wordsworth's carefully crafted
relationship with his society, and the extent to which,
in situating himself in the Lake District, he was
building on an eccentric focus already in existence.
It examines the factors which induced him to adopt this
stance, and the ways in which he sought to appropriate,
and sustain imaginatively, his own "eccentric domain".
In particular, it seeks to distinguish two
contradictory trajectories - inward and outward - and the manoeuvres to which each gives rise. It then looks
closely at a number of shorter poems, illustrative of
th7 variety of what I term "topographical strategies",
wh1ch Wordsworth evolves in order both to defend this
domain against incursions from an aggrandising centre,
and to combat the centre on its own terrain. I end by
looking briefly a t certain factors including his
supposed apostasy which complicate the Victorian
reception of Wordsworth, and which go some way towards
explaining the characteristically oblique homage of
Dickens and Emily Bronte.
Mrs Gaskell, the subject of Chapter 2, represents a
remarkably pure, if occasionally sentimental version of
the Victorian Wordsworth, carrying his enterprise into
the heart of the industrial city. In Mary Barton she
elaborates on Wordsworthian hints of the transfiguring
power of the imagination, to create in Alice Wilson a
memorable characterisation of eccentric virtue, an
alternative moral centre. By furnishing genealogies
for her characters she maps out an underlying geography
which subverts the symbolic and ideological centricity
of Victorian Manchester.
Chapter 3 goes on to examine Wuthering Heights, which
also has an underlying genealogical structure, and
establishes the close kinship between its landscape and
the Lake District. Emily Bronte memorably abstracts
and intensifies the eccentric domain, internalising it
(the familiar inward trajectory), but investing it with
such energy that it acquires a quasi-revolutionary
potential.
In spite of major differences of temperament and social
affiliation, Dickens, the subject of Chapter 4, shares
with Wordsworth an underlying hostility to the 'driven
impetus' of his society. Thus the specifically
metropolitan sources of his inspiration are properly
interpreted as celebrations of eccentricity. He
reproduces both the inward and outward trajectories
embodied in Wordsworth's eccentric enterprise, but
remains reluctant to acknowledge their provenance. The
chapter concludes wi th an account of Hard Times, his
most forthright engagement with the new indliBtrial
forces of the centre. Here problems of serial
publication provoked an uncomfortable identification,
as artist, with the Coketown operatives, both drawn
into unwilling collaboration with alien forces. A
necessary release, negotiated through Stephen
Blackpool's Wordsworthian death, appears to capitulate
to the inward trajectory, but is transformed by
Dickens's metropolitan insights into a much more
positive reassertion of the eccentric domain.