Abstract

This essay argues that the story of Margaret in the first book of William Wordsworth's long poem, The Excursion (1814), prefigures a recessive strain of hopelessness in a work that casts itself as consolatory in outlook. The master trope of this pessimism derives from Last Man narratives popular in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, most notably Mary Shelley's apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826). Margaret's seemingly absolute isolation following the deaths of her husband and children is not literally apocalyptic but, rather, psychological in nature, though not the less catastrophic for that. While this story and others like it in The Excursion are by no means apocalyptic narratives, their consolatory drift might be seen to beg questions of apocalyptic significance for those readers who are having none of Wordsworth's message of forbearance in the face of human suffering.

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