ABSTRACT
The poor are ever with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and because of their own precarious situation, their own self-identification as poor, they make imaginative connections between themselves and the destitute. In July of 1798, Dorothy places their expenses at 110 for the last year with one servant. Both Dorothy’s journal accounts of the poor and William’s intense psychological proximity to his poor shepherd in ‘The Last of the Flock’ indicate that identification with the poor brought the two of them to see the indigent they encountered in powerfully personal ways. Because they defined themselves as poor, others who suffered from poverty moved them. Gary Harrison places William Wordsworth, and consequently one presumes Dorothy, in the middle class and suggests that the shifting perspective offered in William’s poetry stems from general conditions in society, in the precarious and arbitrary nature of the self in a society that exposes individuals to political, economic and social flux.
