This study considers William Wordsworth as a utopian writer who critiques late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century institutional representations of the land by configuring alternative landscapes. Working with Louis Marin's notion that utopian texts comment upon and reconstruct contemporary society by displacing and projecting its structures into a fictional discourse, the study traces Wordsworth's various dystopian and utopian texts from 1793 until 1815. Addressing long-standing critical readings which lament either Wordsworth's displacements of the imagination for the actual and the natural or his displacement of "actual human issues" through poetic idealizations, a utopian reading shows that displacement itself can be a means of active engagement. The process of such an engagement emerges from Thomas More's Utopia which critiques and seeks to reform Britain's sixteenth-century institutional landscape by reconfiguring it as a "no-place" (or ou-topos) that also is a "good-place" (or eu-topos). Wordsworth configures alternative spaces in which the imagination, nature or a more particular manifestation of them (such as a revised idea of pastoral idyll) is seen to have the potential of prevailing over an institutional landscape. This study shows that the landscapes in Wordsworth's poetry and prose respond to and challenge a broad variety of representations of Britain, Europe and the Americas that appeared in state-sponsored and privately financed geographical texts, ranging from domestic descriptions of picturesque topography to accounts of foreign exploration and colonization, from Britain's first national Ordnance Survey to county atlases sold by subscription to large landholders. By considering Wordsworth's writing in relation to such contexts, this study also participates in the recent re-complication of spatio-geographical theory that has been occurring especially in the fields of sociology and geography. Wordsworth's texts show that he, like many others of his time and like many late twentieth-century theorists, understands the sense of space to be both a product and a producer of social experience. His texts suggest that the first step toward reforming social experience is through the utopian imagination of alternative spaces.