Wordsworth's romantic critique of industrial life and society was backward-looking. His 'Golden Age ideal' of pastoral life and rural relationships falls within the scope of English 'populism' as found among the middle ranks of small independent producers and their idealogues. Furthermore his rural education and up-bringing in the remote North of England explain his long-term shift from radical and whig reformer to tory placeman in the years 1789 to 1832 as well as his relative demise as a poet.

In William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, Scott Hess explores Wordsworth’s defining role in establishing what he designates as "the ecology of authorship": a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and nation. Instead of viewing Wordsworth as an early ecologist, Hess places him within a context that is largely cultural and aesthetic. The supposedly universal Wordsworthian vision of nature, Hess argues, was in this sense specifically male, middle-class, professional, and culturally elite—factors that continue to shape the environmental movement today.

By examining the family and financial circumstances of Wordsworth’s early years, this illuminating biography reshapes our understanding of the great Romantic poet’s most creative period of life and writing. Features new research into Wordsworth’s financial situation, and into how the poet and his family survived financially Offers a new understanding of the role of his great unwritten poem ‘The Recluse’ Presents a new assessment of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge

A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-century English letters. This book, one of a trilogy from Palgrave, brings that debate to a decisive conclusion, retrieving the 'historic Johnson.'

The book is a new study that examines the contrasting extension of the Anglican Church to England's first two colonies, Ireland and Virginia in the 17th and 18th centuries. It discusses the national origins and educational experience of the ministers, the financial support of the state, and the experience and consequences of the institutions.

The Rise and Fall of Radical Westminster, 1780-1890 explores a critical chapter in the story of Britain's transition to democracy. Utilising the remarkably rich documentation generated by Westminster elections, Baer reveals how the most radical political space in the age of oligarchy became the most conservative and tranquil in an age of democracy.