1. David V. Erdman, "Wordsworth as Heartsworth; or, Was Regicide the Prophetic Ground of Those 'Moral Questions'?" in The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions Between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, and Betty T. Bennett (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 15. Not all recent students of Wordsworth have seen the connection between his revolutionary and his sexual politics. For instance, in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Nicholas Roe mentions Annette Vallon briefly, but does not focus on this relationship.

2. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman (2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 127.

3. Moorman (1:565) attributes seven sonnets to Calais, but Reed assigns with fairly strong certainty five sonnets to this period: "Calais, August, 1802" ("Is it a Reed that's shaken by the wind"), "Composed by the Sea-Side, near Calais, August, 1802" ("Fair Star of Evening, Splendor of the West"), ''It is a Beauteous Evening," ''To a Friend, Composed near Calais" ("Jones! when from Calais southward you and I"), and "Calais, August 15th, 1802" ("Festivals have I seen

that were not names"). As to the two others attributed by Moorman, Reed acknowledges that it is possible that "To Toussaint L'Ouverture" may belong to the trip, but concludes that "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic" "does not seem on balance certainly assignable to this month'' (Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800-1815 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975], 190).

4. See Irene Tayler, "By Peculiar Grace: Wordsworth in 1802," in Evidence of the Imagination, 119-41.

5. David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire—A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (1954; rpt. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), 74-76.

6. Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals, 152.

7. My text for this and all quotations from Wordsworth's poetry in this chapter (with the exception of the versions of the channel-crossing sonnet first called "The Banished Negroes") is William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford Authors series (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), which provides the earliest version of each poem.

8. In thinking of Wordsworth's conception of the dynamics of the sonnet form in relation to Milton, I have learned from Janel M. Mueller, "On Genesis in Genre: Milton's Politicizing of the Sonnet in 'Captain or Colonel,'" Renaissance Genres, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski, 213-40, Harvard Studies in English 14 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).

9. Kurt Heinzelman discusses Wordsworth's relationship to Milton in a similar context in "The Cult of Domesticity," 63-65 and passim. My work on these sonnets was originally published at the same time as " 'The weight of too much liberty': Genre and Gender in Wordsworth's Calais Sonnets," Criticism (Spring 1988): 189-203.

10. Lee M. Johnson, Wordsworth and the Sonnet, Anglistica 19 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1973), 48-49.

11. J. Hillis Miller, "The Still Heart: Poetic Form in Wordsworth," New Literary History 2 (Winter 1971): 303.

12. Selections from the Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. S. K. Heninger, Jr. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1970), lines 291-95.

13. Spivak, "Sex and History in The Prelude," 326.

14. On this subject see Jacobus, "The Law of/and Gender," as well as Deborah Kennedy's "Revolutionary Tales: Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France and William Wordsworth's 'Vaudracour and Julia,'" The Wordsworth Circle 21 (Summer 1990): 109-14.

15. See, for instance, Markham L. Peacock Jr., The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 187-88. Also, Manning discusses what I find to be Wordsworth's more typical, indirect biblical references in "Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and Its Epigraphs," in Reading Romantics, 68-84.

16. The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ed. George Arthur Buttrick et al., 5 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), 1:21-22. See also the Theological. Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1965),

3:824-26, for readings of the term. I thank T. W. Lewis for his help with these sources.

17. Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 69.

18. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, ed. Andrew and Judith Hook (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985), 376.

19. In comparing Wordsworth's persona to the lover-speaker in the Petrarchan tradition, I am thinking of this lyric tradition in the terms developed by Nona Fienberg in "The Emergence of Stella in Astrophil and Stella," SEL 25 (1985): 5-19.

20. Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals, 153.

21. Reed, Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 191.

22. A related sonnet in protest of the French government is "To Toussaint L'Ouverture." For the political background of Wordsworth's treatment of this well-known historical figure see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d ed. (1938; rpt. New York: Random House, 1963). Toussaint L'Ouverture was betrayed by the French, brought to Europe, and imprisoned on 24 August 1802 at Fort de Joux in the French Alps, where he died of cold and starvation on 7 April 1803.

23. I have constructed this 1803 text from the notes provided by Jared Curtis in the Cornell Wordsworth. See Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

24. Recueil général, annoté, des lois, décrets, ordannances, etc. 1789-1830, 16 vols. (Paris: A l'administration du journal des notaires et des avocats, 1836), 9:361. I thank David Combe of the Tulane University Law Library for his help in finding the ordinance.

Not much has been written on this edict. Shelby T. McCloy, The Negro in France (1961; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1973), mentions briefly that "the census was required by the law of July 2, 1802, which specified that every Negro or mulatto, other than those serving in the French army or navy, who arrived at a seaport was to be put in a depot and sent to the colonies as soon as possible. Negroes and mulattoes of foreign crews, if found on French soil, were likewise to be reported and placed in the depots" (126).

William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with the African: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), argues that the ordinance was in line with prerevolutionary racist paranoia about blacks. He quotes an official document from 1777: "The Negroes are multiplying every day in France. They marry Europeans, the houses of prostitutes are infected by them; the colours mix, the blood is changing ... these slaves, if they return to America, bring with them the spirit of freedom, independence and equality, which they communicate to others" (111).

25. For a discussion of the reporting in the British press, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (New York: Verso, 1988), 251-52: "The British press, which would have been happy to celebrate his [Toussaint's] execution in 1796, gave harrowing accounts of his imprisonment and death."

26. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989), 476.

27. See Mary Jacobus, "Geometric Science and Romantic History, or Wordsworth, Newton, and the Slave Trade," in her Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference, 77.

28. On the British abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1838), see James Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776-1838 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986).

29. See Alan Richardson's "Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony in Blake's 'The Little Black Boy,'" Papers on Language and Literature 26 (1990): 233-48. Wordsworth was familiar with abolitionist discourse. He corresponded with James Montgomery, and the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and his wife Catherine were, for a while, neighbors of his in the Lake District. Catherine Clarkson became one of Dorothy Wordsworth's lifelong friends and correspondents. Allusions to Thomas Clarkson's work for the abolitionist cause are scattered throughout the letters of the Wordsworth family. In Thomas Clarkson, the Friend of Slaves (1936; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970), especially the later chapters, Earl Leslie Griggs discusses the relationship between the Wordsworths and the Clarksons.

30. See McCloy, The Negro in France, 64-85.

31. See Richardson, "Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony," 237-39 and passim; and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992).

32. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 14. Bush also suggests that in Holloway's (sometimes mistaken for Blake's) engraving of the slave Joanna from John Stedman's Narrative, the one bare breast "hint[s] at the alleged sensuality of African women" (16).

33. According to the OED, Malthus used the word intercourse with a sexual connotation in 1798: "An illicit intercourse between the sexes." We have already seen how Wordsworth uses this and related words in the Preface in sexually charged ways.

34. See Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, 2 parts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press for the Menil Foundation, 1989). Honour is specific about the history of the painting, although Jean-Pierre Cuzin, French Painting in the Louvre (New York: Scala, 1982), 92, simply states that the painting was purchased by the Louvre in 1818. I thank Elise Smith for bringing Benoist's painting to my attention.

35. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 340, records this passage from Mary Wordsworth's journal. Although Wordsworth says in his letters that he is more impressed with the Jardin des Plantes (7 October 1820 to Lord Lonsdale, MY 2:642) than with the artworks of the Louvre, Dorothy Wordsworth makes a point of assessing their location in relation to the Louvre: "The only inconvenience is our distance from the Louvre etc, but I am so strong that to me it is nothing" (to Catherine Clarkson, 2:645). They obviously went to the "Louvre etc" frequently.

36. Honour, Image of the Black, 2:6-12.

37. In Wordsworth's Interest in Painters and Pictures (Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley Press, 1945), Martha Hale Shackford provides evidence to show that Wordsworth had a long-standing interest in portrait painting and, because of the human interest in the subject, even preferred it to landscape painting.

38. Honour, Image of the Black, 2:12, 22. In a footnote, Honour states that "It has been suggested that the bare breast symbolizes Liberty and that the head drapery 'two meters long' shows that the subject cannot be a slave" (2:248).

39. See especially Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) for this connection. Nancy Moore Goslee, in "Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion," ELH 57 (Spring 1990): 101-28, provides an analysis of the "master trope" of slavery for racial and sexual oppression in the Vindication and Visions, revealing the problems in conflating racial and gender oppression.

40. See Jacobus, "Geometric Science and Romantic History," 73.