ABSTRACT
Wordsworth told Arnold ‘that, for he knew not how many years, his poetry had never brought him in enough to buy his shoestrings.’ 1 Although he tended to exaggerate the failure of his works to sell, after Lyrical Ballads he had to wait nearly twenty years, until the publication of Peter Bell in 1819, for anything approximating a comparable success, and only with the 1827 edition of his Poetical Works did he start to see steady and substantial sales of his poetry; even then he never came close to the sales of popular poets such as Scott and Byron. 2
