"The Old Cumberland Beggar": Form and Frustrated Sympathy

Abstract

Coleridge claimed that Wordsworth was a Spectator ab extra a writer who had utter non-sympathy with the subjects of his poetry (Table Talk 1: 342). He might have had in mind the last lines of Old Cumberland Beggar in which the poet-narrator declares, in the eye of Nature [the beggar] has liv'd, /So in the eye of Nature let him die (188-9). As David Simpson observes in Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern (2009), modern critics seeking to estimate Wordsworth's probity as a political radical or simply as a minimally decent human being have found it a challenging (63-4). Yet what if criticism of this insensitivity toward the beggar reflects a presumption challenged by the poem, that taking interest in the destitute means discerning their feelings? Wordsworth's detailed description of the beggar rejects the view that concern for the impoverished should be based on sympathizing with or imagining oneself into their situations, a view consistent with attitudes shared by many of Wordsworth's first readers and encouraged by other poems about the poor and homeless, which I call humanitarian. (1) Old Cumberland Beggar does more, however, than oppose an entrenched attitude about sympathy for the poor. The poem also reveals how this form of sympathy can turn coercive, becoming a test rather than a motive for concern. Wordsworth identifies his target audience for poems such as Old Cumberland Beggar, and indicates his decision to baffle the standards of sympathy familiar to such readers, in an 1802 exchange of letters with John Wilson, an undergraduate at Glasgow University. Wilson had complained to Wordsworth that although he admired Lyrical Ballads, he and his associates were unable to sympathize with the disgust[ing] feelings of the poor characters in Idiot Boy (1798) (337). (2) Wilson felt this antipathy was founded upon established feelings of human (338). Wordsworth replies: People in our of life are perpetually falling into one sad mistake, [ ... ] that of supposing that human nature and the they associate with are one and the same thing. Whom do we generally associate with? Gentlemen, of fortune, men, ladies, who can afford to buy or can easily procure books of half a guinea price, hot-pressed, and printed upon superfine paper (Early Years 355). In The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), William St. Clair documents the economic barriers to reading that Wordsworth mentions in his letter. In the Romantic period, only affluent middle and upper-class readers could afford new literature: a new book selling at the price that Wordsworth cites (half a guinea, or 10s6d) would have cost the highest-paid skilled workers in Britain one third of their weekly incomes; it would have strained the weekly budgets of even the professional Wordsworth mentions and the university student he addresses (St. Clair 195). Wordsworth observes that the price of new books turns the opinions of their few purchasers into falsely universal standards: Few ever consider books but with reference to their power of pleasing these [who can afford to buy or easily procure new books] and men of a higher rank (Early Years 355). Wilson, Wordsworth implies, judges Idiot Boy by criteria of sympathy which seem universal only because they are reinforced by a literary culture catering to the price-controlled audience of which Wilson is a member. Given binding costs. Lyrical Ballads would have nearly reached the price that Wordsworth names (10s6d), (3) limiting its initial reception to persons of fortune and professional men. Before composing poems for Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth borrowed and closely read the expensive periodicals, of varied political orientations, that published and reviewed the humanitarian poetry available to his first readership--poetry that largely affirmed Wilson's assumptions about sympathy. …