Volume 1 of The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, as edited by W J B Owen and Jane W Smyser. This is a print version of the new, searchable, navigable, electronic edition of this standard work. Compared with the original Clarendon edition, this one has two advantages: textual notes are more clearly separated and are columnized; and the existence of editorial commentary is indicated by marginal symbols in the text (in the ebook, of course, these symbols are hyperlinked to the commentary). While colour is used in the preview, as in the ebook, the print in the paperback is black and white. The Contents include Wordsworth's famous poetical manifesto, the 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads', his Jacobinical defence of political terror in 'A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff; and an impassioned intervention in the peninsular wars, protesting at British betrayal of Portuguese and Spanish allies at the Convention of Cintra.

This annotated text of the four main political works produced by William Wordsworth enables readers to follow the political peregrinations of a major poet who, as he said to Orville Dewey, an American visitor, gave twelve hours thought to social questions for each hour he devoted to poetry. It includes the Jacobin A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), infused with the doctrines of Tom Paine; the liberal republican 'prose poem' The Convention of Cintra (1809), the Tory apologetics of Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818), and the welfare-state philosophy of the 1835 Postscript in which Wordsworth married the Coleridgean concept of a society leavened by its 'clerisy' to a devastating critique of laissez-faire 'political economy'.