Descriptive Sketches (1791–2)

Abstract

Descriptive Sketches is a very different poem from An Evening Walk; it is no local walk but a European tour, composed according to Wordsworth mostly ‘upon the banks of the Loire in the years 1791, 1792’ (PW I:324). It grew directly out of his experience of revolutionary France and its millennial hopes for man; and like so many of the century’s written accounts of Continental tours, it is a comparative study of the different kinds of human life sustained by the political, geographical and cultural conditions of the different countries it describes: France (45–79), Italy (80–175), Switzerland (176–679), Savoy (680–739) and finally France again (740–809). Wordsworth’s aim, however, is to do more than to instruct and delight his educated readership with accounts of foreign manners, history, arts and politics; his aim is to radicalise them. Guerre aux châteaux! Paix aux chaumieres! — Descriptive Sketches embraces the force of this revolutionary slogan, albeit with reluctance, and focuses its concern exclusively upon the cottage life of the poor in order to judge the economic and political conditions of the countries they inhabit.