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“By the end of the nineteenth century”, as James Vernon proposes, “the founding fathers of sociology—Georg Simmel (1858-1918), Durkheim, Tönnies, and Weber—all considered that living in a society of strangers was the defining feature of the modern condition” (65). The unprecedentedly abrupt rise of mobility and urbanization, as analyzed in their different but all convincing ways, was at the root of a modern society of strangers characterized by anomie and anonymity.

Such a “society of strangers” tremendously stung Wordsworth as he found himself almost lost in the overwhelmingly ubiquitous strangeness, claiming that

How oft, amid those overflowing streets, Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said Unto myself, “The face of every one That passes by me is a mystery! Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed By thoughts of what and whither, when and how, Until the shapes before my eyes became A second-sight procession, such as glides Over still mountains, or appears in dreams… (The Prelude 827)
1.2 In Search of an Anchorage Amidst Strangers

“Not the group but the individual”, in the era of strangers, seemed to be “the heir of historical development” of the nineteenth century (Nisbet 42). Whether from the overall point of decline or progress, this unanimity has covered intellectuals as different as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and Karl Marx (1818-1883), Coleridge, Tocqueville and so on. At that time “when people yearned for humanity and had no heart for their own people; when they philosophized about the state and forgot the community” (Mumford 454), searches for a universal spiritual anchorage became imperative:

…I revolved, How much the destiny of Man had still Hung upon single persons; that there was, Transcendent to all local patrimony, One nature, as there is one sun in heaven. (Wordsworth The Prelude 855).

Here, contrasted with “rather a dissociating than a uniting principle” which Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) identifies in the “aggregation” where “men are brought together by the desire of gain” (69), what Wordsworth emphasizes as “One nature”, with the “Transcendent” power, would embrace isolated “single persons”. Different as these individuals could be, an organic group-living, based on the uniting ties, can be drawn into a communal connectivity of “all local patrimony”. Representative of the innumerable “single persons” were strangers seeking what William Morris has celebrated as fellowship: “Fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and the lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them” (qtd. in Monis 145). Undoubtedly, even hitherto pantingly released from the tyranny from the old order, individuals should not thrown into the state of isolation as the absolute strangers, even “careless of neighbours” (Disraeli 69).

CHAPTER TWO WORDSWORTH’S ATTITUDES TOWARDS STRANGERS

2.1 The Images of Strangers Under Wordsworth’s Pen

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