Wordsworth's Use of Oral History

Abstract

IN an informative general essay on 'Folklore in Nineteenth-century English Literature',' K. M. Briggs rightly points out that Wordsworth, unlike his friends Southey and Coleridge, left no outstanding literary account of the local customs or superstitions of the Lake District. She then goes on to mention that he did, however, make limited use of historical and local legends in several of his poems. In this essay, I shall expand upon her second point by suggesting that Wordsworth was in fact far more deeply interested in local oral history than the existing critical literature indicates and that this is particularly true of history based upon place traditions. It is therefore my purpose here to examine in some detail just how fully and carefully Wordsworth did employ local oral history as a source of inspiration for the poetry of his early and middle years. Wordsworth's interest in oral history2 nearly always stemmed from his love of local peoples and the land with which they were closely allied. When, for example, according to The Prelude (XII), the young poet recovered his 'imagination and taste' amid nature, the men of rural England also re-entered his world. Desiring and deeply needing renewed faith in man, he 'look'd ... among the natural abodes of men, / Fields with their rural works' (0o6-7) and turned to lonely pathways and roads 'enrich'd with everything [he] prised, / With human kindness and with Nature's joy' (i25-6). There he found vagrants endlessly willing to converse and