ABSTRACT
Dorothy Wordsworth's texts disclose the benevolent ideology of 'Lady Bountiful', but it is transformed because of the way she privately practices philanthropy, and because of the medium though which we come to know about it, her journal. The journal defines behaviors, values, and acts which will improve individuals, perhaps not monetarily but morally. In contrast to associated philanthropy of the mid-eighteenth century, 'self-help' philanthropy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries offered opportunities for women to enter a growing arena of public involvement. D. Wordsworth's description is in sharp contrast to W. Wordsworth's rendering of the exchange. In his poem 'Beggars', the lack of material necessities is not highlighted; the reader is moved to feel pity for some lost time or landscape, and not for the beggars' poverty. Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal posits a benevolent feminine identity central to reconceiving what she presumes are 'real' gender and class relations.
