William Wordsworth: A Biography - The Early Years 1770-1803

To have discovered the Godwin and James Losh diaries, and to have thrown some new light upon the schooldays, upon Racedown, Alfoxden, and Goslar would seem unspectacular enough. Although the broad outline of the early years remains unchanged, Mrs. Moorman has so enriched it with detail and made it so much more coherent than it ever was before, that the period stands forth almost as a new thing. The most impressive achievement perhaps is to be seen in the passages of social and local history: accounts of the many places where Wordsworth's story is set, of the Lowther lawsuit, the undergraduate world of Cambridge; information about members of the family, and about those friends and acquaintances that flit like half-remembered names across the scene. The stories of Annette Vallon and of Michael Beaupuy are filled out; the account of Wordsworth's revolutionary activity is clarified; the narratives of the tour in France and Switzerland, the visit to Germany, and all the comings and goings in England and Wales before the first settlement with Dorothy at Racedown are clearly unfolded. With great care, Mrs. Moorman has unravelled and dated the biographical content of The Prelude and other poems. Wordsworth's last years were given over partly to "tinkering" his poems, as the family called his compulsive and persistent habit of revising his earlier poems through edition after edition. The Prelude, for instance, went through four distinct manuscript versions and was published only after the poet's death in 1850.