ABSTRACT
The Hidden Wordsworth' emerged from a long list of possible alternatives, some fanciful, some merely generic: the unknown Wordsworth, the invisible Wordsworth, Wordsworth incognito, the undiscovered Wordsworth, the hidden Wordsworth, the radical Wordsworth, the Wordsworth-we-never-knew, and so on. When The Hidden Wordsworth first appeared, in 1998, its title and substance provoked, besides a heartening amount of praise and some scandalized cries of dismay, several issues of generic interpretation and research methodology that the author think are worth pursuing in more general contexts of Romantic biography. More important is the fact that none of the words in the title, including the sub-title, were sensational so far as they concerned Wordsworth's youth and young manhood. But in Wordsworth's case his involvements with the Home Office would not be considered 'romantic', since they appear to be on the wrong side, in support of the repressive conservative reaction against the Friends of Liberty in Britain.
