Stephen Gill
Wordsworth and the Victorians
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. 346.
Reviewed by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso

Although William Wordsworth and the Romantic movement have enjoyed much critical attention in recent decades, comparative studies of this author and period are relatively scarce. Several monographs and collections have regarded British Romanticism in the context of the history of ideas, an approach that has produced some of the best work in the field (including the volumes by René Wellek [1965], Hans Eichner [1972], and James Engell [1981]), but the formalist tendency in criticism during the twentieth century has prevented comparatism from carrying on with its project.

For this reason, Stephen Gill's contribution to Romantic studies is both necessary and welcome. His book traces the reception of Wordsworth during the Victorian years, with special chapters devoted to the views of Eliot, Tennyson, and Arnold. Starting with Wordsworth's life and work of his last twenty-five years, Gill studies the poet's growing frame and importance brought about by three factors: the publication of the last version of The Prelude, the publication of his biography, and the erection of public monuments in his honour. These three facts set in motion a process of canonization that was not without conflicts of interpretation (as the author argues, Wordsworth was construed and assimilated as a religious, skeptical, or classicist poet, depending on the specific mind-set of the reading community). This is not, then, an analysis of Wordsworth's ideas and their transmission to the Victorians, but rather a critical description of how the Victorians reacted to Wordsworth's poetry, and how this was used to enlarge the powers of Victorian literature.

The conclusion that Wordsworth was one of the leading influences on the Victorians is reached by analyzing the original sources in two different ways. On the one hand, a textual criticism of the various editions that Victorian publishers issued, either complete editions ore selections. On the other, the recollections and opinions of a multiplicity of Victorian critics, editors, and commentators, some of them highly influential at the time. Particularly useful are the parallels Gill establishes between Wordsworth and the works of several Victorian writers. From Tennyson's In Memoriam to Eliot's Silas Marner and Adam Bede, we can see how Wordsworth's poetry and his Prelude were reread and influenced the changes, both public and private, that conformed the Victorian age. In that, Stephen Gill has provided an invaluable study, one that not only establishes the connections between two adjacent literary periods, but also reveals the importance of Wordsworth for the Victorians and for modern British literature in general.