• List of Illustrations ; A Note on the Text ; Abbreviations ; 1. Fame ; 2. England's Samuel: Wordsworth as Spiritual Power ; 3. 'Fit Audience': The Marketing of Wordsworth ; 4. The Poetry of Humble Life ; 5. Wordsworth at Full Length: George Eliot ; 6. The Active Universe: Arnold and Tennyson ; 7. The Wordsworth Renaissance ; 8. The Last Decade: From Wordsworth Society to National Trust ; Appendix: The Membership of the Wordsworth Society in 1884 ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index

Of the works describing Wordsworthian influence, pre-eminent was Stephen Gill's cultured and pleasurable Wordsworth and the Victorians, which effectively recreates a lost Wordsworth: the Victorian man of letters and laureate, spiritual teacher and sage for an anxiously secularizing age ... Gill has gathered from remote corners an immense amount of material ... all of which Gill views with an exemplary historical sympathy, not untouched by a spry sense of the absurd or paradoxical.