ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the critical reception of Wordsworth’s The Excursion and Peter Bell with reference to Francis Jeffrey’s extended Edinburgh critique of The Excursion’s ‘enthusiastic’ characteristics, and the attack on Peter Bell’s dramatic resolution by Leigh Hunt, editor of the free-thinking weekly journal, The Examiner. It examines the itinerant narrative framing of The Excursion and Peter Bell. The chapter shows that affinity in the peripatetic, or ‘pedestrian’, inspiration of Wordsworth’s poetic, and the independent spirit of field evangelism. The itinerancy of the youthful Wanderer in The Excursion could signal an arrogant rejection of the social community and the responsibilities which membership of this community entailed. A number of titles of Wordsworth’s poems, from the early ‘Evening Walk’ to The Excursion, implicitly celebrate movement and the associated concept of freedom and independence. The Excursion explains how the central characters’ solitary philosophical quests involved abandoning formal institutional loyalties.
