The Unaccountable "Knot" of Wordsworth's "Gipsies"

Two recent studies by David Simpson have drawn renewed attention to William Wordsworth's "Gipsies." Simpson's critique re-establishes the important historical issues the poem reflects; but, in concentrating on questions of labor, he overlooks another important category, that of counting and abstraction. This issue is particularly vital at a time when England was first instituting a national census. Also, it has wide ramifications for Wordsworth's poetry, as a brief glance at an encounter in a more well known poem, "We Are Seven," shows. The encounter between the poet and the little girl in Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" dramatizes how representation is a contest between different systems of classification. Both the poet and the little girl insist on counting what is there, what can be pointed to, yet because they differ on what they determine to be there, they arrive at different sums. As Frances Ferguson notes, the little girl's "ability to count her siblings first merely involves her ability to place them despite their physical absence from this place," and, in fact, her dead siblings and the proximity of their graves are more available for ostensiveness than her two other siblings who have "'gone to sea.'" ¹ The poet attempts to explain to her that, when counting people, the dead do not count. Acting like a census enumerator, he insists upon counting only those siblings who meet his own "pre-established codes of decision," and while his set criterion of living versus dead seems unexceptionable, her set criterion of near versus far seems equally unexceptionable. ² While Ferguson is undoubtedly correct in deriding those readings of the text that see it as an attempt by the poet "to impose his hegemonic system upon an innocent victim," it is nonetheless important to recall that Wordsworth himself characterized the poem as showing "the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion." ³ While different opinions of what is to count may make for good drama, ultimately somebody determines what is to count, just as the census enumerator records his count, closes his ledger, and moves on to the next village.

Bluff empirical men like the one depicted in "We Are Seven" fanned out across Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century to construct empirical representations of the nation. Counting and classifying--funded for the first time by the government--was carried out on a national scale, and the national institution of the census helped to consolidate the available representations of the nation, and to reduce the nation and its people to abstract empirical constructs. Contemporaneous with this national attempt at self-definition was Wordsworth's self-conscious attempt at mid-career to position himself as the poet of the nation; and because these attempts all emerged out of an Enlightenment episteme of measurement, classification, and control, the institution of the census and the activities of Wordsworth demonstrate dialectically how the attempt to consolidate available representations--of the nation, the poet, or the national poet--both overwrites other representations and calls counter-representations into existence. However, if the taking of a national census is an epistemological act aimed at controlling the people by gaining knowledge of them, it would seem that to avoid being counted is to escape government supervision and discipline. While appealing to a romanticized celebration of individual defiance (and a paranoid view of government), such a view neglects the very real use to which the numbers are put. Census officials everywhere admit the possibility of undercounting, but what they are reluctant to admit is that some segments of the population are more liable not to be counted than others. The impact of race and class on the seemingly simple act of enumeration has created a politics of counting that achieved widespread prominence in the United States when the mayors of Detroit and New York...