William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty by Heidi J. Snow (review)

the term ‘‘Anglo-Catholicism’’ here for fear of confusion with the concerns raised by the Oxford Movement. Most strikingly, Jones does not consider alternative interpretations. It could be objected, for example, that Fish, Tyndale, and Bale were above all inspired by the writings of Martin Luther and that they wrote within the framework of Lutheran theology as they understood it, owing little if anything to Langland. It could be objected that what drove the ‘‘commonwealth’’ writers of the mid-century was not medieval satires (did the ‘‘commonwealth’’ writers really produce satires?) but on the one hand the plight of the ploughman as they understood or misunderstood it (were not the economic, social, and agrarian difficulties of the 1540s obvious?) and on the other hand their absorption of that strand of Christian teaching which renounced the vanities of this world and saw greed as the root cause of men’s suffering. If the plight of the poor was a common theme, the context was very different. It was hard by the mid-16th century to blame the plight of the poor on the rapacity of the mendicants. Jones cites economic and agrarian historians such as Dyer and Britnell in his bibliography, but it cannot be said that their work informs his text. There is a real challenge of interpretation here. Writers, not least Thomas More in Utopia, painted a vivid image of the social ills provoked by enclosures, yet modern agrarian scholars are skeptical that enclosure was as prevalent and as recent as ‘‘commonwealth’’ writers would claim. Perhaps, however, the criticisms raised in this review of a book which has been well received within its subject reflect the different methodologies current in the study of literature and of history and that what this review is doing is criticizing a literary scholar for not being a historian. Yet historians might reasonably counter that labels should be chosen with care and that they should arise from clearly demonstrable patterns in our sources rather than being explored as a kind of intellectual conceit. And sources should not just be quoted but should be read in a questioning spirit, not least against the grain of fashionable orthodoxies. G.W. Bernard University of Southampton Heidi J. Snow. William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. viii+ 152. ISBN 978-1-4094-6591-1. $104.95. Heidi J. Snow begins her study of William Wordsworth’s relationship with religious ideas about the poor with a personal vignette of her scholarly self emerging from the British Library after having been immersed in the works of 18th-century Quaker John Scott. Then, by a fast-food emporium, she writes, ‘‘Sitting cross-legged and huddled up against the walls of the restaurant, a dirty, bedraggled woman held her hand out and said, so softly it was nearly lost in the bustle of the passing pedestrians, ‘Spare change please’.’’ Snow’s initial desire to ignore the woman and hasten onward is overcome by her recollection of Scott’s insistence upon the claims that Book Reviews 117 the poor make upon us. Snow buys the woman dinner in the adjacent eatery (vii– viii). And I must confess that my first action after completing this book was to retrieve a solicitation from the trash and send a check to Oxfam America. I do not fully subscribe to all the assertions that William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty (hereinafter WWTP) makes with respect to the poet, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, but I cannot deny the power of the argument and the force of WWTP’s presentation of the prevalence of poverty in the Romantic Era, the various ways that contemporary Christianity structured responses, and the presence of both poverty and Christian responses in Wordsworth’s poetry. And, as Snow’s own story testifies, there is no expiration date on poverty and our need to acknowledge and respond. And let me add, too, that WWTP is eloquently written. Even the most casual readers of Wordsworth’s works cannot deny how many poor people populate them. From ‘‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’’ to the Leech-gatherer of ‘‘Resolution and Independence’’ to the shepherd Michael...