Summary
The speaker begins by reflecting on his writing process so far. He explains that he began five years ago, but has worked in fits and starts, only recently stopping work on the Prelude for several years. But, one night ago, a group of singing birds inspired him to take up the story again. Now, in the morning, he prepares to launch back into the story of his life beginning with the period just after he left Cambridge and finished his time in the Alps. He decided, he explains, to move to London—a place he had previously visited but never settled in. There was a time when every fantastical setting described in stories or history paled beside the speaker's imaginary version of London. When he was a child, a schoolmate visited London, and the speaker remembers feeling surprised and disappointed when his classmate came home looking unchanged by the metropolis. The speaker pushed him to describe London's wonders and was met with noncommittal answers. Most of all, he was baffled by how urban neighbors could live so close to each other but never know each other. At the time, his imagination ran wild with images of London's neighborhoods, the Thames river, and landmarks like St. Paul's Cathedral. Now, he sees them in person, and describes the sheer chaos and busyness of the city streets, packed with people, carriages, and a heady mixture of poverty and luxury. The buildings loom like the title pages of books, announcing their contents. The overwhelmed speaker turns onto a quieter street, but still he sees a vast array of people and places. There are exotic animals on display, vendors calling out their wares, and stately homes. Elsewhere, advertisements and pamphlets hang from walls. The speaker sees people of every nationality and race. He also witnesses all kinds of artistic work taking place, especially tiny scale models of famous places, painstakingly portrayed in miniature. At the Sadler's Wells theater, he witnessed larger-scale entertainment in theatrical renditions of both familiar and new stories. One play was based on the true story of a woman whom the speaker and Coleridge, his addressee, had been raised with. This woman, an innkeeper's child known to all for her modesty and charm, had been tragically tricked into a bigamous marriage with a deceptive man. She is now dead, buried alongside her young child outside a chapel in the place where she and the speaker both grew up. The speaker contrasts the dead woman and her child with another parent and child: a mother and son he sees in the theater audience. The mother wears heavy makeup and is part of a crowd of crude, unfeeling revelers. But her baby is beautiful and reminds the speaker of the rural cottage life he was raised in. He wonders if the boy, now an adult, would envy the baby buried outside the mountain chapel. Backtracking, the speaker recalls that, several years before moving to London, he first heard a woman speak blasphemously. He found this painful and upsetting to witness.
The speaker adored going to the theater at this time and enjoyed every genre of play. He acknowledges that his topic seems frivolous, but says that theatrical performance was lively and clarifying in a way that real life often wasn't, and that it helped him understand and react in ways he otherwise could not. He frequented other types of performance as well, observing courtrooms and even parliament, watching the speeches of lawyers, awed by their skill and eloquence. He also watches clergymen deliver sermons, equally impressed with powerful oration in the theater, the courtroom, and the church. Meanwhile, the speaker struggles with the feeling that every person around him in the urban crowd is a stranger. But sometimes his attention is drawn back to individuals—for instance, a beggar holding a sign. The beggar's stare feels like a reproach to the speaker, who is startled from his state of alienation and confusion. At other times, his state of mind is overwhelmed by the rare quiet of nighttime in London. But such moments pale beside events like the Fair of St. Bartholomew. In an almost surreal sequence, the speaker describes the hellish, senseless nature of the huge crowd at this festival. The mixture of people and objects around him press in terrifyingly. However, he says, the spirit of nature remains with him—the permanence and gravity of the mountains infuse his outlook. Because he was raised in nature, he has the ability to look out at the crowd with less distress, perceiving the individual pieces within it.
Analysis
This book of the Prelude represents a sudden turn in terms of content. Except for a brief sequence at the book's end, it does not touch on or describe the natural world. Instead, it portrays the speaker during a period of alienation from nature. While the Cambridge scenes of the Prelude also show the speaker cut off from the landscapes he loves, this section is far more extreme, with London presented as the absolute antithesis of rural solitude. The speaker's attitude towards London is ambivalent. On the one hand, he finds it overcrowded, unfriendly, and degraded. He associates it with moral depravity—especially for women—and meaningless, asocial conduct. But, almost against his will, he is fascinated by the city's constant action, its multiculturalism, and above all its unrelenting performance.
The speaker expresses indignation towards one specific expression of London's superficiality—the makeup of the woman at the theater. He links her artificial flush with falseness and immorality. With this comes with some suggestion that she is sexually promiscuous (in fact, heavy makeup was associated with prostitution in the period). In this sense, Wordsworth uses her as evidence of a specifically feminine moral degradation that he associates with urban life. He describes her in contrast to the Maid of Buttermere, the young woman being depicted onstage. The Maid is a feminine ideal. She is innocent, modest, maternal, and pastoral. The rouge-wearing woman in the audience and the blasphemy-uttering woman that the speaker describes shortly afterward are her opposite—experienced, vulgar, and urban. Through these portrayals, Wordsworth sets out a number of ideas about how women should act, especially towards their children. He also suggests that living in the city will prevent women from acting morally and maternally. A skeptical reader, of course, might notice that the most valorized of these women, the Maid of Buttermere, dies at a tragically young age: feminine morality does not appear to guarantee feminine safety or happiness.
But another way to view the theatergoing woman's makeup is as a performance, paralleled by the one happening onstage. And, as much as the speaker is horrified by one specific type of performance, he is enthralled by others. These include not only the theater, but sermons and courtroom speeches, as well as street performers' shows. In fact, he hints that the whole of city life is a performance of sorts, since people constantly look at others but never get to know them. Without him saying so explicitly, it is clear that the speaker is torn when it comes to superficiality and performativeness. He hates the fact that he is surrounded by strangers' impenetrable faces, but sometimes finds himself deeply affected by them, able to connect as individuals without speaking. He is overwhelmed and even morally scandalized by street vendors' cries and women's makeup, but he is also drawn to the theater in part because it is false, or, as he says "gilded": its separateness from real life has an appeal and a utility.
The theater, the courtroom, and the various other performance spaces described (formal and informal) are venues for oral speech. However, the speaker also encounters quite a few written documents here. Wordsworth wrote the Prelude at a time when print culture was becoming increasingly dominant and print material was becoming ubiquitous. Wordsworth describes the words that identify building-fronts, the flyers and posters hanging from walls, and even the written sign of a woman begging on the streets. Print, in London, isn't restricted to books or literature, which has been the primary way in which the speaker has thus far interacted with the written word. Previously, he read when he chose to open a book, so that interaction with writing was conscious, voluntary, and deliberate. But now, because of both his new location and the social changes occurring at the time, the written word is everywhere, and he can't control when and whether he encounters it. These passages describe an unprecedented relationship to print and writing.
