ABSTRACT
One of the fascinating indices of this confusion is the convergence of minds between William Wordsworth and his erstwhile antagonist, Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff. Watson's Westminster sermon of 1785, the 1793 appendix to which prompted Wordsworth's unpublished republican Letter, is a wholly representative document in the charity debate. Watson praises private charity as a Christian duty, tied to the divinely sanctioned institution of private property. Charity, as Raymond Williams has observed, was originally synonymous with 'Christian love, between men and God, and between men and their neighbours', and only later acquired the narrowed sense of help to the needy. It is under the umbrella of this traditional Christian conception of charity that Wordsworth shelters with the Bishop, and formulates the message of The Old Cumberland Beggar. One might digress at this point to say something about the Wordsworth's actual experience of beggars at about this period, of which a substantial and detailed account survives in Dorothy's journals.
