{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022099447513812154, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0055248618784530384, 'mean_word_length': 5.44, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Lydia Maria Child and the Abolitionist Afterlife of William Wordsworth

It is difficult to overstate the personal and professional changes that Lydia Maria Child experienced when she published her controversial Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans in 1833. Her substantial audience, composed of readers on both sides of the Atlantic who admired the romances, cookbooks, and home economy manuals that had made her famous, viewed her first overt foray into national politics with something less than anticipatory zeal. Her Boston benefactors, scared off by their association with a newly born radical, abandoned her. Her family and friends, many of whom did not share her abolitionist stance, avoided her company. From this point on, Child’s career was defined by her participation in the antislavery movement, and though she continued to write romances, they were overshadowed by her subsequent abolitionist monographs and her editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. But even though readers both then and now have tended to see her Appeal as distinct from her own literary productions, its literary vestiges—its inclusion of poems, its penchant for narrative interpolations, and its epigraphs from Coleridge, Cowper, Montesquieu, Sterne, and Shakespeare—belie such a distinction. Some epigraphs seem more apropos than others, however, and the least apropos ones come from The Excursion, William Wordsworth’s 1814 epic