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

华兹华斯的《我们是七个人》是华兹华斯所有抒情歌谣中最著名或最臭名昭著的一首。在这首歌中，一个乡下女孩被一个纠缠不休的彬彬有礼的探问者质问。它在整个十九世纪都被重印、选集、插图，有时被称赞，有时被恶搞。这本书是唯一一本作为侧面出版的文集，它仍然萦绕在大众的想象中，作为受过教育的意识和它试图了解的其他人之间关系的一个感人的、令人不安的、尴尬的小插曲。1798年，当《我们是七个人》被写成时，绝大多数人口对受过教育的少数人来说都是陌生人。关于它们的社交信息匮乏，这在今天几乎是不可想象的。他们有多少人，甚至是大约有多少，都不得而知。他们说一种不同的方言，或者更确切地说，说许多不同的方言。少数人开始在激进的出版物上发出自己的声音，但大多数人的生活，正如杰里米·边沁所说的那样，“笼罩在默默无闻中”。然而，对民众激进主义的恐惧以及对法国入侵的担忧，给人们对民众人数和意见的质疑带来了一种新的紧迫感，而这个国家很大一部分人濒临挨饿，引发了人们对贫困人口状况的新担忧。这项研究认为，华兹华斯简单的小诗尖锐而富有启发性地指向了那个时代的一些中心问题。以此为起点，我首先探讨了受过教育的阶级在18世纪最后几十年是如何试图找到他们生活在其中的“人”的。前两章追溯了18世纪末英国的“统计调查”的开端，以及它所面临的方法和实践上的困难；马尔萨斯之前的政治思想中“人口”的重要性，以及导致1801年第一次人口普查的关于“计算人口”的争论。第三章和第四章描绘了这一时期人们日益增长的兴趣，不仅是对条件，而且对人们的习俗和信仰，越来越多地被视为其他人，在这个时候，受教育的阶级。他们研究了英国流行的古董学家的著作，以及这些年来华兹华斯圈子对“低俗迷信”的迷恋。他们还探索了18世纪末人们对旅行、写作和地形学的语言和传统产生了一种相当不同的兴趣(华兹华斯也很熟悉)的起源。这些完整的章节是基于广泛的原创研究。他们探索了丰富的原始材料，其中大部分没有被历史学家讨论过，也从来没有以这种方式考虑过。它们提供了比我们目前所拥有的任何关于‘统计’调查的开始、我们现在所称的‘民俗学’以及英国国内人种学的更详细的描述。他们比较详细地考虑了这种探究所暴露的实践和哲学困境，我要说的是，华兹华斯敏锐地意识到了这一点。在这一点上，最后两章更具投机性，但我已经开始起草它们，我很清楚他们会问什么类型的问题。第五章将探讨这首诗对女孩具有挑战性的陌生感的生动、准确的刻画所引发的问题。它将考虑这样一种可能性，即华兹华斯实际上表达了另一种心态的特征，这种心态可以在这一时期的“人”的一些记录中找到：一种对时间、地点和人的概念与“有礼貌的人”的概念显著不同的人。第六章将更直接地关注这首诗，这首诗一直是贯穿始终的参照点。它将考虑重复和节拍在华兹华斯与这些问题的接触中的象征力量，以及他利用和重新创作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.