Why, then, was it not issued to the world with these?  Why was it locked up in the poet’s desk for twenty-one years, and shown during that time, as we gather from its author’s language to Southey, to few, even of his close friends?  To these questions we find no reply vouchsafed, but perhaps it is not difficult to discover one.  Every revolutionist in literature or art produces some composition in which he goes further than in any other in his defiance of recognised rules and conventions.  It was Wordsworth’s central theory that no subject can be too simple and no treatment too naked for poetic purposes.  His poems written at Alfoxden are precisely those in which he is most audacious in carrying out his principle, and nothing, even of his, is quite so simple or quite so naked as Peter Bell.

Hazlitt, a very young man, strongly prejudiced in favour of the new ideas, has given us a notion of the amazement with which he listened to these pieces of Wordsworth, although he was “not critically nor sceptically inclined.”  Others, we know, were deeply scandalised.  I have little doubt that Wordsworth himself considered that, in 1798, his own admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of Peter Bell, while, even so late as June 1812, when Crabb Robinson borrowed the MS. and lent it to Charles Lamb, the latter “found nothing good in it.”  Robinson seems to have been the one admirer of Peter Bell at that time, and he was irritated at Lamb’s indifference.  Yet his own opinion became modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 1819) he calls it “this unfortunate book."[1] In another place (June 12, 1820) Crabb Robinson says that he implored Wordsworth, before the book was printed, to omit “the party in a parlour,” and also the banging of the ass’s bones, but, of course, in vain.

[Footnote 1:  The word unfortunate is omitted by the editor, Thomas Sadler, perhaps in deference to the feelings of Wordsworth’s descendants.]

In 1819 much was changed.  The poet was now in his fiftieth year.  The epoch of his true productiveness was closed; all his best works, except The Prelude, were before the public, and although Wordsworth was by no means widely or generally recognised yet as a great poet, there was a considerable audience ready to receive with respect whatever so interesting a person should put forward.  Moreover, a new generation had come to the front; Scott’s series of verse-romances was closed; Byron was in mid-career; there were young men of extraordinary and somewhat disquieting talent—­Shelley, Keats, and Leigh Hunt—­all of whom were supposed to be, although characters of a very reprehensible and even alarming class, yet distinctly respectful in their attitude towards Mr. Wordsworth.  It seemed safe to publish Peter Bell.