Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. ISBN: 0-393-04623-0 (hbk). Price: £30/$45.00 (hbk).

The analogy between biography and portraiture is such a commonplace that we scarcely notice its metaphoric complications. "A wholly new portrait," proclaims Stephen Parrish of The Hidden Wordsworth, "fleshed out, humanized, and very compelling." "Looking at Wordsworth's earliest portraits," begins Kenneth Johnston's first sentence; his biography, he tells us, "is a portrait in words that attempts to restore the fire to Wordsworth's eyes." From its dust jacket, title page, and half-titles the heavy-lidded Wordsworth of the Edridge portrait looks out at us; even a likely spurious portrait, possibly resembling the one William Hazlitt may have destroyed, is carefully considered, speculated about, and set aside. Johnston's work, however, is far different from the portraiture we usually find in literary biographies. Most biographies resemble portraits in this respect: they focus on their subjects exclusively, reducing to shadows friends, relatives, and influential contemporaries, and barely sketching in the social milieu which they inhabited. The Hidden Wordsworth, however, more closely resembles a Flemish landscape: its scope is very broad, and it is filled with figures, all of them minutely articulated and in motion. Johnston has written what amounts to a social history of England in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, and in its midst, one can trace the frequently obscure narrative of Wordsworth's life, its dark places made more visible than ever before by Johnston's strenuous effort to integrate one man's life with what used to be called "his times." Lacking hard evidence for much of Wordsworth's doings (largely because of the Wordsworths' systematic attempts to hide them), Johnston speculates, argues from probability and by analogy, and relentlessly mines passages from poems, notebooks, account books, and government records for what they can yield about the poet. One can argue with Johnston's conclusions and disagree about the nature of his evidence. But one cannot dispute one thing: this is the most important study of Wordsworth of our time, and will shape the course of Wordsworthian studies for the next half-century. Johnston fleshes out his portrait by investigating Wordsworth's family, his sexuality (including the question of incest), his finances, and his political involvements more thoroughly and fearlessly than any of his other biographers. His argument is that the Wordsworth we know, the poet of calm tranquillity amidst the storms of Helvellyn (the poet, that is, of the great Haydon portrait, which never appears in Johnston's book), is the self-conscious creation of a man whose early life was anything but tranquil. And this means (as Stephen Gill has also argued) that Wordsworth's account of himself in The Prelude must be handled with care. "It is like one of those Renaissance paintings," remarks Johnston, "with the artist himself represented down in a lower corner, gesturing toward his subject. Except that, in this case, the subject turns out to be ... the subject himself." (p. 13) To break through all this self-fashioning, Johnston adopts a simple "rule of thumb ... : when there's a choice of possibilities, investigate the riskier one." (p. 9) Such a procedure is bound to create controversy. Johnston's most controversial argument, as all RoN readers are by now aware, is that Wordsworth was a paid government agent during his trip to Germany in 1798-99. The argument rests on an entry in the Duke of Portland's account book, recently acquired by the Wordsworth Library, indicating a payment of nearly £100 to a "Mr. Wordsworth;" on the same page, payments to several known spies are also entered. This is slender evidence, as Johnston well knows, but taken together with other events (in particular, Wordsworth's mysterious association with a known French double agent), …