Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Wordsworth: The Sense Of History [Review], Michael Fischer

English Faculty Research

Alan Liu's Wordsworth: The Sense of History is a large book containing a multitude of materials on a wide range of subjects: Napoleon's military tactics, the indebtedness of Lake District weavers, the social history of criminal punishment, the class structure of Lakeland agricultural society, and the floor plans of late eighteenth-century rural cottages (to name only a few). As if all this were not enough, Liu often apologizes for not providing more, as when he admits that "full proof" of one of his hypotheses "opens to view ... a research field not as fully investigated as others and too vast …