William Wordsworth’s first published epic poem, The Excursion (1814), is an ‘elegiac epic’ concerned with how traces of former human existence in the local landscape (graves, epitaphs, and tales of life and death) affect feelings of despair and hope among the living. Eschewing traditional historicist approaches to the poem, this paper locates a strong intertextual relationship between arguments made by the poem’s three main characters and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century field of antiquarianism. The characters of the Solitary, the Wanderer, and the Pastor deploy the materials, methods, and ideologies of antiquarianism to convey both similar and contrasting positions on moral philosophy, religion, and historiography. Comparing the antiquarian images, language, and allusions used by the three characters dispels the sense of an author’s unified position in the debate. The three characters’ opinions may reflect Wordsworth’s positions on the uses of antiquarianism in philosophical, religious, and political debates at different stages of his life, but antiquarianism remains an ambiguous text in the poem, associated with a range of philosophical positions and feelings. The paper illuminates a number of key antiquarian expressions in the poem, and allusions to antiquarianism in contemporary literary texts. The paper concludes that each of the three characters’ relationships to antiquarianism in the poem subverts the others. The Solitary is diagnosed with ‘despondency’, but his antiquarian characteristics serve as examples of past and present intellectual and moral strength. The Wanderer represents a position of antiquarian optimism, but is himself a second-order antiquarian character in the text, a fiction in which the other two characters may not believe. Finally, the Pastor appears to support the Wanderer’s optimistic use of antiquarian materials and methods to ‘cure’ the Solitary, but in fact negates the Wanderer’s optimistic and fanciful historiography with a pessimistic and solipsistic reduction of antiquarianism to Christian dogma. An intertextual approach that considers The Excursion in relation to antiquarianism demonstrates the multiplicity of historiographic perspectives in the poem, and Wordsworth’s willingness to allow different and conflicting stages of his thoughts and feelings free play in the poem’s dialogues.
Christopher E. J. Simons (Mon,) studied this question.