Given the pivotal role that the French Revolution plays in The Prelude, it is surprising that William Wordsworth's engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the prophet of the revolution – has not received more attention. Much has been published on Wordsworth's apostasy from revolutionary to counterrevolutionary ideologies. By this account, Wordsworth's poetry turns from its early faith in revolutionary possibility to seek refuge in the private imagination. In particular, his later poetry (of approximately 1807 onwards) and revisions of his earlier works are often dismissed as a decline into reactionary torpor. I propose reframing The Prelude within a broader history of ideas that goes beyond the impasse of Wordsworth's ideological reprobacy and quietism, to reclaim his later developments as integral to his thought. Understanding Wordsworth's response to Rousseau in a framework that looks beyond The Confessions relates The Prelude's politics to the problems of social contract theory. And conceiving of Wordsworth's reaction to the French Revolution through the social contract's theoretical conflicts frames Wordsworth within an ongoing modification of contract theory rather than a flight from politics. The Prelude, read across its 1805 and 1850 versions through Wordsworth's allusions to Rousseau's social contract, emerges from this perspective as an epic poem about the fraught status of individuals within a new configuration of civilisation rather than an apotheosis of private imagination created by political disillusionment.

Recent studies of Wordsworth's engagements with political economy have gone a considerable way towards modifying this standard view of Wordsworth. Philip Connell suggests that readings of Wordsworth and Coleridge as Tory reactionaries do not reflect ‘their abiding reputation as the first, prophetic critics of high capitalist society’ (Connell 2001: 125). Mary Poovey notes that literature and political economy defined one another dialectically over the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often through a pattern of mutual repudiation whereby literature affirmed itself as the antithesis of economy, and economy – in turn – undercut values of humanism (Poovey 2008: 28). Wordsworth attached prefaces and instructions to his poems to define literary value as a ‘new, nonmarket model of value’, an alternative to political economy (ibid. 290).