Domestic Affections and Home

That the language of ‘domestic affections’ and ‘home’ has a much wider register, and ideological reverberation, than a reference to any immediate domicile and family is reflected everywhere in Lyrical Ballads, localised in rural districts though its poetry and prefaces may be. In 1790, Edmund Burke excoriated the French Revolution’s degradation of home and domestic affections in historical and national terms. He celebrated the antithesis to new France in traditional England, where ‘conservation’, ‘transmission’ and ‘inheritance’ of ‘property’ operate on one ‘principle’, founded on the ‘method’ and ‘pattern of nature’. The Burkean state endures as a family settlement, ‘a permanent body composed of transitory parts’, a home for national domestic affection beating ‘in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world’.