“Strike not from Law’s firm hand that awful rod”: Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain and the Penalty of Death

Abstract

This essay argues that Wordsworth’s attitude toward the death penalty is more consistent than is usually recognized. Both the early and late versions of the Salisbury Plain poems, for instance, identify the importance of personal responsibility and accept that execution is sometimes, as the oft‐derided Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death put it, the only “fit retribution.” This perspective was, however, complicated by Wordsworth’s awareness of the excesses of the Bloody Code, his antipathy to the authoritarian policies of Pitt’s government, and by his allegiance, during the mid‐1790s, to the philosophy of Godwin’s Political Justice. A close analysis of the Salisbury Plain poems in the context of popular calls for penal reform reveals not only Wordsworth’s long‐standing interest in the issue of capital punishment and his determination to participate in the contemporary debates about the matter, but also the extent of his growing estrangement from Godwin’s necessarian principles during the composition of Adventures on Salisbury Plain.