Readers who think of Wordsworth as a visionary poet with his head in the clouds would be surprised to discover that these were his words. Such concern with the minutiae of domestic life as getting, spending, and weighing might not seem Wordsworthian. But these thoughts were on the seventythree-year-old poet's mind when he dictated notes on his poetry to his friend Isabella Fenwick. Ah, the puzzled reader might now say, these are the concerns of the stodgy old poet, not the fiery young man of the 1790s. But I will argue here that from an early age Wordsworth was concerned with home-making and with the dynamics of gender within 'household economy'. While we do see a shift in emphasis from the early to later years (an embracing of Victorian domesticity), the idea of domesticity as the source of family, love, and stability remains a constant in Wordsworth's life and work.

Paradoxically, too, Wordsworth’s critique of housewifery in the quoted passage referred to the popular poet Felicia Hemans, a woman who did not find the kind of domestic happiness in her own life that she praised in her poetry. Hemans might not have managed Minerva’s spear or a nineteenth-century lady’s needle, but she certainly used her pen to praise the idea of domesticity. In fact, she helped usher in the Victorian view of Wordsworth as soother of the soul and family poet: ‘Thine is the strain to read among the hills / . . . Or by some happy hearth where faces meet.’