Evoking the Local: Wordsworth, Martineau and Early Victorian Fiction

Scholars have often recognized the 1830s and 1840s as the decades in which Wordsworth first achieved significant commercial success as a poet. Yet, during these same years the market for poetry in Britain was in decline. The present article attends to these two seemingly contradictory developments, arguing that Wordsworth’s success in this period can be linked to a broader shift in literary tastes towards fictional works representative of human life in its most particularized and locally distinctive forms. After examining Wordsworth’s sales figures and his relationship with the publisher Edward Moxon, the article proceeds to situate Wordsworth within this shift by combining close readings of his pastoral poem ‘Michael’ (1800) and Harriet Martineau’s precedent-setting novel Deerbrook (1839). Long regarded as the first Victorian novel of provincial life and manners, Deerbrook is shown not only to anticipate the kind of locally distinctive qualities that distinguish the works of novelists ranging from the Brontës to Thomas Hardy, but also to embody the kind of literary sensibilities that made contemporary readers receptive to Wordsworth’s verse.