Lucy Revived

I must begin this short essay by outlining the main points of the debate about the "Lucy Poems." Wordsworth composed three of them late in 1798 and published them one after the other, each of them untitled, in the 1800, 1802, and 1805 Lyrical Ballads: these were 'Strange fits of passion I have known,' 'She dwelt among th'untrodden ways,' and 'A slumber did my spirit seal.' They are all concerned with love and grief; the first two of them use the name Lucy. They are set apart from the titled poem 'Lucy Gray,' which has to do with the death of a child and not a grown woman, and also from the untitled 'Three years she grew,' which reflects upon the death of a beloved young woman named Lucy. In 1802, Wordsworth tried to add another untitled poem that names Lucy, 'I travelled among unknown men,' to follow 'A slumber,' but the printer let him down. In the 1815 Poems, he kept the first two poems together and added 'I travelled' to the set, but printed 'Three years' and 'A slumber' in a different section. Some of Wordsworth's contemporaries referred to the poems about a grown Lucy—four or five, depending on whether you count 'A slumber'—as a group, and Victorian editors reinforced this way of thinking by printing them all together as a series, although Wordsworth himself had never done so. Some readers argued for the inclusion of other poems such as 'She was a phantom of delight' and 'Among all lovely things my love had been' (another naming Lucy; also known under the title 'The Glow-Worm'). The critical establishment amused itself with biographical speculation and source-hunting until 1965, when Hugh Sykes-Davies blew the whole thing apart by showing that the supposed Lucy cycle was a fiction made up by editors, anthologizers, and parodists. In his excellent recent book, The 'Lucy Poems': A Case Study in Literary Knowledge, Mark Jones agrees, on the whole, with Sykes-Davies, describing the grouping as 'an editorial decision, an interpretive simplification' of Wordsworth's 'broken and shifting lyrical orderings'. Case closed. Well, no, not entirely. Jones's concern is with the reception of Wordsworth's work. He works forward from the time of publication to the present, using compelling critical analysis to show how one generation after another has made over the Wordsworthian corpus to reflect its own interests, including Sykes-Davies's New Critical agenda. He himself, interested in ambiguity, indeterminacy, and reader response, is ready to concede that Wordsworth's groupings hinted at connections, teased and encouraged readers to make connections; he believes that Wordsworth expected 'to provoke the constructive activity of readers' (Jones 3). But he declares that 'If it is easy now to "recognize" the "Lucy Poems" as early instances of "internal narrative," this category was not fully viable when they were first composed' (Jones 87). If you look back instead of forward, however, it is possible to find a precedent for the implicit narrative sequence in a scattered and shifting series of lyric poems about another Lucy—Lucy Fortescue Lyttelton. Lucy Fortescue was married to George Lyttelton of Hagley Park, Worcestershire, in 1742. She bore three children, two of whom survived her, and died at the age of 29 in 1747. Her husband was a rising MP with powerful family connections; he later became a Chancellor of the Exchequer and the first Baron Lyttelton. He remarried in 1749, but the second marriage ended in a separation. He was a man of letters and a patron of literature. He seems to have been a kind person: he came to be known as 'the good …