Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Dates of readings
- A Note on texts
- Wordsworth's reading 1770-1799
- Appendix I Possible readings
- Appendix II Wordsworth's Hawkshead and classical educations, and his College examinations at Cambridge
- Appendix III Books purchased for Wordsworth, 1784-6
- Appendix IV Wrangham and his library
- Appendix V Thomas Poole's library and the Stowey Book Society
- Appendix VI Coleridge's Bristol Library borrowings
- Appendix VII Joseph Cottle's Bristol Library borrowings
- Bibliography
- Index
Wordsworth's reading 1770-1799
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Dates of readings
- A Note on texts
- Wordsworth's reading 1770-1799
- Appendix I Possible readings
- Appendix II Wordsworth's Hawkshead and classical educations, and his College examinations at Cambridge
- Appendix III Books purchased for Wordsworth, 1784-6
- Appendix IV Wrangham and his library
- Appendix V Thomas Poole's library and the Stowey Book Society
- Appendix VI Coleridge's Bristol Library borrowings
- Appendix VII Joseph Cottle's Bristol Library borrowings
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Addison, Joseph, Cato
Suggested date of reading: by 1791
References: Cornell DS 40
In Descriptive Sketches W alludes to Syphax's description of an African who ‘Blesses his stars, and thinks it luxury’ (Cato I iv 71).
Aikin, John and Anna Laetitia Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773)
Suggested date of reading: by spring 1787
References: see note
Miscellaneous Pieces contains a Gothic prose fragment called Sir Bertrand from which W borrowed several details for one of the central episodes in The Vale of Esthwaite, composed during the spring and summer of 1787 (lines 210-21 in De Selincourt's text). The episode begins:
I the while
Look'd through the tall and sable isle
Of Firs that too a mansion led
With many a turret on it's head
(D.C.MS 3 18r; De Selincourt 210-13)Although W may be thinking of the castellated and partly ruined Calgarth Hall on the eastern shore of Windermere, the description probably borrows from Sir Bertrand: ‘by momentary glimpse of moon-light he had a full view of a large antique mansion, with turrets at the corners’ (Miscellaneous Pieces 129).
Akenside, Mark
(i) The Poems of Mark Akenside [1772]
Suggested date of reading: 1779-87; by spring 1785
References: see note
W's earliest surviving poem, Lines Written as a School Exercise (1785), contains a reference to ‘fair majestic truth’ (line 12). Akenside's invocations at the beginning of The Pleasures of Imagination include one to ‘The guide, the guardian of their lovely sports, / Majestic Truth’ (i 22-3).
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- Wordsworth's Reading 1770–1799 , pp. 1 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993