Category: Events

Monday evening, Wilson Library celebrated the new rare book exhibition Lyric Impressions: Wordsworth in the Long Nineteenth Century. A viewing and reception were followed by a tour-de-force lecture entitled “Wordsworthian Carnage,” delivered by Professor Duncan Wu of Georgetown University.

The cold rain could not keep away over 80 poetry and rare book enthusiasts, who enjoyed the enlightening display of 140 items, curated by Elizabeth Ott from the RBC’s Wordsworth Collection and related holdings. The exhibition examines Wordsworth’s writing within the context of world events spanning over a century, from the years of the French Revolution to the First World War. The multiple editions and issues of Wordsworth’s poetry also demonstrate the remarkable changes in book production during that period, as technology and literary markets developed at an unprecedented pace. In 2010 Mark L. Reed, III, Lineburger Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, tripled the size of the Wordsworth Collection with a gift of 1,700 volumes, making such an exploration possible. And so, Monday evening was also an occasion to honor Professor Reed and his extraordinary generosity, which has helped UNC become a leading repository for print editions of the British Romantics.

Professor Wu took as the subject for his lecture a notable line in William Wordsworth’s “Thanksgiving Ode,” which was written for a general day of thanksgiving in Britain just a little over 200 years ago, January 18, 1816. That commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo brought forth Wordsworth’s complex thoughts and feelings about the decisive world event. His poem, which failed to find critical acclaim in general, became best known instead for one verse in particular: “Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.” In a presentation worthy of London’s West End as well as the halls of academe, Professor Wu investigated the significance of those words through passages from other writers—including Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt. Faculty, friends, and staff, as well as UNC students past and present, all left energized by Professor Wu’s dramatic performance, its scholarly sweep, and the power of poetry.

In the after-festivities, David Vander Meulen, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, presented the Rare Book Collection with an unusual copy of the 1879 Poems of Wordsworth, edited by Matthew Arnold. Reed’s comprehensive collecting culminated in 2013 with an exemplary scholarly resource: A Bibliography of William Wordsworth 1787-1930, published by Cambridge University Press. Professor Vander Meulen, editor of the distinguished journal Studies in Bibliography, recognized the 1879 volume as an unrecorded variant of A163 in Reed’s bibliography. As he noted, “several features do not appear to match the descriptions of the first printing: Spine. The imprint reads simply  ‘Macmillan’ (as in issue 1), but Arnold’s name is absent  (as in issue 2); First gathering. Leaf π1, ordinarily containing the Golden Treasury Series device and the epigraph, is not present. (But the book does have the tissue guard facing the title page, which is on ‘moderately stiff paper’).” Professor Reed observed that the binding seemed to represent a state between his bibliography’s first and second bindings, “a very exciting discovery.”

Professor Vander Meulen spoke for Studies in Bibliography colleague Elizabeth Lynch and himself: “The gift above all is to show respect for Mark’s magnum opus and labor of love, the Wordsworth bibliography.  It is a remarkable accomplishment, characterized by uncommon thoroughness, accuracy, and understanding. . . . The donation also signals gratitude in a more personal way.  We remain appreciative and indebted to Mark’s article in Studies in Bibliography on the title pages of Lyrical Ballads.  It’s a model that I provide to students in my bibliography class every year.”

Mark Reed’s collecting began almost fifty years ago with the acquisition of a copy of Lyrical Ballads, and it is fair to say that this most recent thoughtful addition to the Wordsworth Collection won’t be the last. With such a formidable establishment, UNC is committed to the continued growth of its Wordsworth Collection as well as its allied British Romantic holdings.

A catalog of Lyric Impressions is being published and will be available through UNC Press. Look forward to an announcement on our blog.

One of the most difficult tasks in mounting exhibitions is the sometimes nerve-wracking choice of what to include and what to edit out. “Kill your darlings,” as Faulkner would have it in writing fiction, is just as apt when choosing which six or seven books and objects will stand in as evidence of a rich and complicated historical narrative. These decisions were particularly difficult for Lyric Impressions: Wordsworth in the Long Nineteenth Century—the rare book exhibition that opened at Wilson Library on January 20th.  Clocking in at more than 2,000 volumes, The William Wordsworth Collection is so vast that one exhibition could never do justice to the whole. To remedy that reality, we’ll be undertaking a series of blog posts to explore Wordsworth publications that didn’t make it past the cutting room floor. Each post will expand on the major themes of the exhibition. In this post, we’ll explore Wordsworth’s productive and turbulent development in the decade of the 1790s by considering his first published books: An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (1793).

By the time he published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Wordsworth had developed a distinctive poetic voice, one he conceived of as a departure from the studied, high-flown style popular for much of the eighteenth century. In An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, composed between 1787 and 1792, this poetic voice was still nascent; in both poems, Wordsworth relies on earlier poetic models, such as Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The poems’ allusive qualities were not lost on his contemporary audience, whose mixed critical reception of the works drew attention to their derivative qualities. Neither were they lost on Wordsworth himself, who later wrote that he found them to be “juvenile productions, inflated and obscure,” nevertheless, they contained “many new images and vigorous lines….”

Sales of An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches were not robust. While it is unknown how many copies were issued in the initial print run, the audience of the two works appears to have been small. Wordsworth commented in 1801 that “Johnson [his publisher] has told some of my Friends who have called for them, that they were out of print: this must be a mistake. Unless he has sent them to the Trunk-maker’s they must be lying in some corner of his Warehouse, for I have reason to believe that they never sold much.” Whether or not the unsold copies were indeed scrapped for paper waste, today copies of the first editions are relatively scarce.

Aside from offering a window on Wordsworth’s developing poetic voice, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches are important works juxtaposed with Wordsworth’s politically charged poetry of the same period. In the 1780s and 90s, Wordsworth was also composing more explicitly radical poems, such as “Salisbury Plain,” and “Letter to the Bishop Llandaff.” An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches both follow a tradition of loco-descriptive verse, where the poet’s reaction to an evocative landscape or monument triggers a philosophic and aesthetic experience. They do not, as some of his other poems of the 1790s do, explicitly confront the incendiary political issues of his youth. Though Wordsworth’s political attitudes are not wholly absent from his published verse, his unpublished (or largely unpublished) poetry is more direct and, at times, inflammatory.

Wordsworth’s radical discontent in the 1790s reflected the mood of the country. At the beginning of the decade, economic disparity had reached alarming levels. Radical sentiment, spurred by the rhetoric of the American Revolution and the ideals of the French Revolution, circulated widely. But 1793 would prove to be a decisive turning point, as the British Government enacted a series of increasingly draconian measures designed to stamp out radical dissent, among them the Treason Trials and the suspension of habeas corpus in 1794 and the so-called “Gagging Acts”—the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act—in 1795. The government actively sought out radical agitators and their associates—including Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were purportedly investigated by a government spy in 1796.

An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches anticipate Wordsworth’s poetic trajectory toward philosophic verse and also the turning political tide in England. By the close of the 1790s, Wordsworth’s idealistic radicalism had matured and changed, though he would maintain an active interest in political and current events throughout his life.