The Romantic Political Economy of Reading: Or, Why Wordsworth Thought Adam Smith was the Worst Critic Ever

Why did Wordsworth call Smith the worst critic ever? It wasn't because he thought economics and literature were radically distinct: both men saw these domains as interfused. Nor was it because Wordsworth opposed Smith's argument that mass education defused working-class unrest: Wordsworth himself advanced this argument in The Excursion. Nor was it because Smith's argument, drawing on Hume, implied the historicization of readerly experience: this historicization was central to Wordsworth's poetics. But Smith's debt to Hume meant that his theory also implied the feminisation of the mass readership. This formed the kernel of Wordsworth's opposition--which was as much to himself as to Smith.