Peter Bell’s Professions

This article investigates the socioeconomic contexts of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell in relation to Peter’s ‘profession’ – to use Wordsworth’s term, when he wrote that first among the ‘great defects’ of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is that the protagonist ‘has no distinct character … in his profession of Mariner’. Peter Bell is a ‘potter’; Wordsworth’s footnote to the 1819 first edition defines this as ‘a hawker of earthenware’. Modern scholarship accepts the northern definition of potter as ‘pedlar’, effacing the connection to pottery. Yet evidence in the poem suggests that Wordsworth understood the socioeconomic contexts of the poem’s Swaledale setting in 1798–1800, with particular knowledge of the area’s role as the heart of Britain’s lead-mining industry. Peter’s presence in Swaledale links him, through his ‘professions’, to lead mining in the Pennines; and through lead mining, to the Staffordshire pottery industry and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s friends and patrons, Tom Wedgwood and Josiah Wedgwood II.