Rural Existence and Moral Economy in William Wordsworth’s “Michael”

DOI

https://www.doi.org/10.59256/ijrtmr.20260605003

Published In

Volume 6, Issue 5 (2026)

Published Online

September-October 2026

Pages

26-33

Article Type

Original Article

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William Wordsworth’s “Michael: A Pastoral Poem” presents rural existence not simply as a pastoral ideal but as a way of life sustained by land, labour, family responsibility, inherited memory and economic independence. At the centre of the poem is an old shepherd whose attachment to his estate cannot be understood in purely financial terms. The land represents ancestral labour, domestic continuity and the future that Michael hopes to secure for his son Luke. This article reads these relationships through the concept of moral economy, using the term to describe an order in which economic value remains closely connected with social obligation and familial responsibility. The financial crisis that threatens Michael’s estate reveals the fragility of this order. His decision to send Luke away is intended to preserve the family property, yet the separation removes the future heir from the household, landscape and shared labour through which his relation to that inheritance has developed. The unfinished sheepfold becomes the most powerful material expression of this failure. It begins as a practical agricultural structure, becomes a covenant between father and son, and finally survives as a memorial to interrupted inheritance. Through close attention to land, labour, property, domestic life and memory, the article argues that “Michael” neither merely celebrates rural simplicity nor simply condemns social change. Wordsworth instead examines how a meaningful rural existence becomes vulnerable when economic necessity separates the material conditions of inheritance from the human relationships that give inheritance its value.