We are seven: the discovery of the people in late eighteenth-century England

华兹华斯的《我们七人组》中，一个“村姑”被一个纠缠不休的“礼貌的”询问者询问，这也许是华兹华斯所有抒情歌谣中最著名的，或者说是最臭名昭著的。这本书在整个世纪被重印、编成选集、配插图，有时受到赞扬，有时被戏仿，是这本书中唯一一本以正面报道的形式出版的，它仍然萦绕在大众的想象中，作为一个感人的、令人不安的、令人尴尬的小插曲，展示了受过教育的意识与它试图了解的“他者”之间的关系。1798年，当《我们七岁》被写出来的时候，绝大多数人对受过教育的少数人来说都是陌生人。关于他们的社会信息之少，在今天几乎是不可想象的。不知道，甚至大约，有多少人。他们说的是不同的方言，或者说是许多不同的方言。少数人开始在激进的出版物上发出自己的声音，但正如杰里米·边沁所说，大多数人的生活“笼罩在黑暗中”。然而，对民众激进主义和法国入侵的恐惧使人们对人民的数量和意见产生了新的紧迫感，而全国大部分人濒临饥饿的状况促使人们对“穷人的状况”产生了新的关注。本研究认为华兹华斯的“简单”的小诗尖锐而有力地指向了它所处时代的一些中心问题。以此为出发点，我开始探讨了在18世纪的最后几十年里，受过教育的阶级是如何试图了解他们生活在其中的“人”的。前两章追溯了18世纪末英国“统计调查”的起源，以及它所面临的方法和实际困难;马尔萨斯之前“人口”在政治思想中的重要性，以及导致1801年第一次人口普查的关于“给人民编号”的争论。第三章和第四章描绘了这一时期人们越来越感兴趣的情况，不仅是人们的状况，而且是人们的习俗和信仰，越来越多地被认为是他者，在这个时候，受过教育的阶级中。他们研究了英国流行的古文物学家的著作，以及华兹华斯圈子这些年来对“粗俗迷信”的迷恋。他们还探讨了一种相当不同的兴趣（华兹华斯也很清楚）的开始，在18世纪后期的旅行写作和地形中，人们的语言和传统。 这些完整的章节是基于广泛的，原始的研究。他们探索了大量的原始材料，其中许多未被历史学家讨论，许多从未以这种方式考虑过。他们提供了一个更详细的帐户比我们目前有“统计”调查的开始，我们现在所谓的“民俗”，和国内民族志在英国。他们在某种程度上详细地考虑了这种探究所暴露的实践和哲学困境，我将指出，华兹华斯敏锐地意识到了这一点。 最后两章在这一点上更具推测性，但我已经开始起草它们，我对它们将提出的问题有一个很好的想法。第五章将探讨这首诗生动、精确地描绘了这个女孩具有挑战性的陌生感所提出的问题。它将考虑华兹华斯实际上是另一种心态的表达特征的可能性，这种心态可以在这一时期的“人”的一些记录中找到痕迹：一个人的时间观念，地点和人的观念与“礼貌”的观念有很大不同。第六章将更直接地关注这首诗，它一直是贯穿始终的参考点。它将考虑华兹华斯与这些问题的接触，重复和韵律的象征力量，以及他利用和改造传统民谣形式的方式。

Wordsworth's 'We are seven', in which a 'cottage girl' is questioned by an importunate 'polite' enquirer, is perhaps the most famous, or notorious, of all Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. It was reprinted, anthologized, illustrated throughout the nineteenth century, sometimes praised, sometimes parodied.The only one of the collection to be published as a broadside, it still haunts the popular imagination, as a moving, disturbing, embarrassing vignette of the relation between the educated consciousness and the 'other' it seeks to know. In 1798, when 'We are seven' was written, the vast majority of the population were strangers to the educated minority. There was a dearth of social information about them almost unimaginable today. It was not known, even approximately, how many of them there were. They spoke a different dialect, or rather, many different dialects. A few were beginning to make their voices heard in radical publications, but the lives of most were, as Jeremy Bentham put it, 'shrouded in obscurity'. Yet fears of popular radicalism and also of a French invasion were bringing a new kind of urgency to questions about the numbers and opinions of the people, and the near-starvation of a large proportion of the nation was prompting a new concern with the 'state of the poor'. This study argues that Wordsworth's 'simple' little poem points sharply and suggestively towards some central issues of its time. Taking it as a starting-point, I begin by exploring how the educated classes attempted to find out about the 'people' amongst whom they lived in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The first two chapters trace the beginnings of 'statistical enquiry' in late eighteenth-century England, and the methodological and practical difficulties it faced; the importance of 'population' in political thinking before Malthus, and the debates about 'numbering the people' that led to the first census of 1801. The third and fourth chapters chart the increasing interest in this period not merely in the condition but in the customs and beliefs of the people, increasingly perceived as other, amongst the educated classes at this time. They examine the writings of the English popular antiquarians, and the Wordsworth circle's fascination with 'vulgar superstition' in these years. They also explore the beginnings of a rather different kind of interest (likewise well known to Wordsworth) in the language and traditions of the people in late eighteenth-century travel writing and topography. These completed chapters are based on extensive, original research. They explore a wealth of primary material, much of it undiscussed by historians, much never considered in this way. They offer a much more detailed account than any we currently have of the beginnings of 'statistical' enquiry, of what we now call 'folklore', and of domestic ethnography in England. They consider in some detail the practical and philosophical dilemmas exposed by such enquiry, of which, I shall be suggesting,Wordsworth was sharply aware. The two final chapters are at this point more speculative, but I have begun to draft them, and I have a good idea of the kinds of questions they will ask. Chapter Five will explore the questions raised by the poem's vivid, precise portrayal of the challenging strangeness of the girl. It will consider the possibility that Wordsworth is actually articulating features of another mindset, that can be traced in some of the records of the 'people' in this period: one whose conceptions of time, of place, and of the person were significantly different from those of the 'polite'. Chapter Six will focus more directly on the poem which has been a constant point of reference throughout. It will consider the signifying force of repetition and metre in Wordsworth's engagement with these issues, and the ways in which he exploits and re-works the traditional ballad form.