"Enjoyments, of a [. . .] more exquisite nature": Wordsworth and Commodity Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay seeks to explore Wordsworth’s ambivalent relation to the commodity culture emerging in England around the turn of the Nineteenth-century. It does so by examining his unpublished poem "The Ruined Cottage" and his preface to Lyrical Ballads in two related contexts: the discourse of advertising and the history of consumer culture, including the institution of peddling. Wordsworth’s promise of the possibility of "enjoyments of. . . a more exquisite nature" available in his poetry if readers are willing to "give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed" as poetry is similar to the structure of advertisement copy then as now: give up the product you now enjoy for a new and improved one. In the very essay in which he articulates a critique of industrialization and consumerism, Wordsworth unwittingly proposes a consumerist solution to the problem of consumerism. Drawing on the historical work of Colin Campbell and Neil McKendrick, this essay suggests that a dynamic similar to that operating in the preface holds for "The Ruined Cottage" as well. There is a distinct pattern in the poem, particularly in the Pedlar’s visits to Margaret, of intense but fleeting attachment which is similar to the process of consumption in which buyers form an intense attachment to a commodity which is abandoned a short time later as attachments to new products are formed. Far from being an example of the Romantic ideology in which poetry evades history, the poem can be seen as a Godwinian analysis of the ways which social forces and institutions "insinuate themselves" into the most intimate matters (82).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".