Wordsworth, Social Reform Literature, and Politics of the 1790s Essay

Wordsworth, Social Reform Literature, and Politics of the 1790sThe historical mix of social fictions in England and France at the end of the 1780s greatly impacted the literary productions of the period. Tom Paines The Rights of human beings (1791) and Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791) were the two most widely represent works that spurred a decade long debate on how the landed estate of England was to be governed and by whom. As a young man during this period, William Wordsworth organize part of the circle of writers who fought for the Republican cause of democracy and its ideals. Similar to the poet William Cowper, Wordsworths betimes poetry contributed to a larger framework of social reform literature that the publisher Joseph Johnson promoted throughout his career from the late 1770s until his death in 1809. several(prenominal) of Wordsworths early prose works mark what he was to later reflect upon in his poem, Lines Written a Few Miles above Tinter n Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, 13 July 1798. Tintern Abbey reminds Wordsworths readers of the solitude and sad perplexity (61) that its author experiences five years afterwards his dreams of a democratic republic and love for Annette Vallon are dashed by Frances Reign of Terror and war with England. He recounts Five years watch passed five summers, with the length Of five long winters . . . . . . . And so I make bold to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I bounded over these hills, . . . Flying from something that he dreads than one Who sought the thing he loved. (1-2, 66-67, 72-73)1Tintern suggests Wordsworths deal to move beyond the sentiments and finds he once held, as reflected in his unpublishe... ... a friend of Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, and Horne Tooke Mary Wollstonecraft listened to Prices occasional political sermons, and was influenced by his view that all people were entitled to equa l education. Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft A ultra Life. London Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000 59-61.4. Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in, Paul Keen, (ed. compiler). Reading (at) the make of the Bourgeois Public Sphere. Burnaby Simon Fraser University Publishing, 1999 145.5. Ibid, 147.6. Tom Paine is referring to William the Conqueror, quoted by E. P. Thompson in, The Making of the English functional Class. Middlesex Penguin Books Ltd., 1963 94-95.7. Ibid, 94.8. Christopher Hill. The Norman Yoke, in Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited. New York Oxford University Press, 1997 361.