English Gesellschaft

In an 1817 letter, Wordsworth complained to Daniel Stuart, “I see clearly that the principal ties which kept the different classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other have, within these thirty years, either been greatly impaired or wholly dissolved. Everything has been put up to market and sold for the highest price it would buy . . . . All . . . moral cement is dissolved, habits and prejudices are broken and rooted up, nothing bing substituted in their places but a quickened self-interest.”