William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  William first attended this dame school when he was three, so he later asserted, for he maintained that this was when he first played with the Hutchinson girls, the daughters of another local shopkeeping family in Penrith, very close friends and playmates of both Dorothy and William from their earliest Penrith days. Penrith, however, takes up almost no space at all in The Prelude, apart from a rather strange incident which happened on the Beacon, the local landmark which towers over the town.

  When he was not quite six, he went riding on the hill with an old family servant called James. They became separated and William found himself on the spot where a gruesome murder had been committed some ten years previously—a spot marked with the victim’s initials—and where the murderer had been eventually gibbeted, as was the custom of the times. It was a murder well known to everyone in the area and William, being very young, was suitably terrified. Rushing off in a panic, he came across a mysterious young girl, battling up the hill with a pitcher on her head. He admits it was ‘an ordinary sight’, to see such a girl carrying water, but the little incident had a great mystical and visionary effect on him, which he remembered years and years later. Wordsworth scholars have made much of the incident, searching for hidden psychological insights, analysing every word, dissecting every feeling, researching the details of the murder, but it would seem, to use his own words, an ordinary little incident, of the sort many people would come up with, if asked to search back in their memories for the first occasion on which they were frightened. Its claim to interest, in any study of Wordsworth, is that it is the first recorded event in his life during which he remembered having a visionary ‘spot of time’.

  William’s mother Ann became ill in early 1778 and was confined to bed for about two months, judging by some rather hefty medical bills. The family belief was that she’d caught a cold while sleeping in a damp bed on a visit to London to see a friend. For a shopkeeper’s daughter from Penrith, going to London, with or without her lawyer husband, would have been quite an adventure; but nothing else is known of the circumstances. William, in The Prelude, hints that someone else was to blame (perhaps whoever lent her the damp bed). She died on 8 March 1778 in her parents’ house in Penrith, from what appears to have been pneumonia, and was buried in the parish churchyard, though there is no sign of the grave today. She was only thirty years old. William was aged eight.

  I remember my mother only in some few situations [William later recalled], one of which was her pinning a nosegay to my breast when I was going to say the catechism in the church as was customary before Easter. I remember also telling her on one week day that I had been at church, for our school stood in the churchyard, and we had frequent opportunities of seeing what was going on there. The occasion was a woman doing penance in the church in a white sheet. My mother commended my having been present, expressing a hope that I should remember the circumstance for the rest of my life. ‘But,’ said I, ‘Mama, they did not give me a penny, as I had been told they would.’ Oh,’ said she, recanting her praises, ‘if that was your motive, you were properly disappointed.’

  William’s last sight of her was when passing the door of her room is she lay on her death-bed. Her death robbed him of ‘the props of his affections’ and he was now alone, to be sustained by his own spirit. The five young children felt destitute, left, from then on, to ‘troop together’.

  The Cookson grandparents had had their daughter’s children for months on end, over the previous few years, so they were used to looking after them, but they didn’t welcome the idea of having even more to do with William. There were constant clashes between them, and between William and his Uncle Kit, the one who later took over the Crackenthorpe estates and moved to the big house. William appears to have been proud of his defiance and his rebelliousness, and to have been unabashed by any punishments, though on one occasion, after some row, he retired to an attic room where he contemplated suicide, taking hold of a foil as if to end it all.

  Upon another occasion [William recalled], along with my eldest brother Richard, we were whipping tops together in the large drawing room, on which the carpet was only laid down upon particular occasions. The walls were hung round with family pictures and I said to my brother, ‘Dare you strike your whip through that lady’s petticoat?’ He replied, ‘No, I won’t.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘here goes.’ And I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But possibly from some want of judgement in punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and obstinate in denying chastisement and rather proud of it than otherwise.

  Wordsworth, on the whole, glorified all his childhood, and most of his memories are totally happy. He tended in his poems and later recollections to minimize those unhappy early times at Penrith with his grandparents. At the time he probably couldn’t grasp why they disliked him so much, or why they made so little effort to understand him. His beloved sister Dorothy, who was always very upset by William being picked upon, was his only real comfort in these early Penrith days, but in June 1778, a few months after the death of their mother, Dorothy was sent away to live in Halifax, Yorkshire, with relations. She didn’t see William again for nine years. William didn’t find it as easy to troop together with his brothers, though all the boys usually spent Christmas together with their father in his Cockermouth house. Dorothy had been the only one completely in tune with his moods and personality.

  Not long afterwards, in 1779, when he was nine years old, it was decided that William in turn should be sent away, not to a relation as with Dorothy, but to a school on the other side of the Lake District. It was yet another change. The cultural, rather liberal base of his father’s big house had been replaced early in his life by the more stifling, bourgeois, shopkeeping mentality of the Penrith family home. The change had not helped his naturally rebellious, wilful nature. As for the death of his mother, who knows what scars that created. But, perhaps surprisingly, the next nine years turned out to be the years of his genuinely happy childhood.

  TO A BUTTERFLY*

  Composed 14 March 1802, it deals with one of Wordsworth’s earliest memories of his Cockermouth childhood. Emmeline stands for Dorothy, his sister.

  STAY near me—do not take thy flight!

  A little longer stay in sight!

  Much converse do I find in thee,

  Historian of my infancy!

  Float near me; do not yet depart!

  Dead times revive in thee:

  Thou bring’st, gay creature as thou art!

  A solemn image to my heart,

  My father’s family!

  Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,

  The time, when in our childish plays,

  My sister Emmeline and I Together chased the butterfly!

  A very hunter did I rush

  Upon the prey;—with leaps and springs

  I followed on from brake to bush;

  But she, God love her! feared to brush

  The dust from off its wings.

  * The poetry which comes at the end of each chapter is not necessarily meant to be an example of Wordsworth’s finest work but more of biographical interest, either being written during the period dealt with in the preceding chapter or somehow related to the mood or content of that particular chapter.

  2

  Hawkshead

  1779–1787

  HAWKSHEAD is a little town in south Lakeland, between the lakes of Windermere and Coniston. It was the home town of Ann Tyson, a lady not known today to the world at large but still remembered in Hawkshead for her connection with young William Wordsworth. She was married in 1749, aged thirty-six, to a local carpenter called Hugh Tyson. They had no children and, when his business declined, she opened a little shop which sold foodstuffs and clothing materials. They did a good line in luxury goods, such as tea at up to eight shillings a pound, though the most popular brand was something called Bohea, a dark tea which sold at 4s 4d a pound. Tea and coffee were relatively new in Engl
and at the time, but very popular with those who could afford them. Those who couldn’t drank ale. Mrs Tyson also sold sugar, brown or white, and a crystallized sugar which she referred to as Candy, which was popular with local schoolboys. This is mentioned in her accounts in 1762, seven years before the first known example of the word ‘candy’ appeared in print, according to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

  The good townspeople of Hawkshead could certainly afford their little luxuries. It was a thriving town, back in the eighteenth century, a centre for the woollen trade, an ancient activity in southern Lakeland which had gone on for centuries and had been famous in Shakespeare’s day. (He refers in Henry IV to a well known cloth called Kendal green.) There were no roads as we know them in the area, not till towards the end of the century, and no carriages until 1792, but the rough tracks were alive with pack-horses, carrying on their backs the raw wool, the finished materials, or the products of other local industries, such as charcoal-burning. The charcoal was used for iron-ore smelting in little bloomeries which dotted the surrounding forest areas, right down to the Furness coast. Pedlars, very often Scotsmen, moved from town to town, hawking their wares. Sad soldiers, also often Scotsmen, trudged along the pack routes, limping with their wounds, back to their homeland. England was at war almost ceaselessly for about forty years, starting in the 1770s, with America struggling for its independence, and continuing with the long war with France which followed the Revolution.

  By 1779, the Tysons, now well into their sixties, had given up the shop and had decided instead to take in boarders, boy pupils from the local grammar school. Amongst their first batch were two young Cockermouth boys, Richard and William Wordsworth.

  Mrs William Cookson from Penrith, the boys’ grandmother, paid the Tysons ten guineas for their board and lodgings for the half year, plus 10s 6d extra for Ann Tyson to do their washing. It is not known who rode down with them from Penrith to settle them in. Perhaps the family groom, James, brought them. Their father, John Wordsworth, was apparently too busy with his Lowther affairs to take them down personally, though he did pay their grandmother for having settled their bills.

  William was nine and Richard eleven. They spent their entire Hawkshead schooldays with Dame Tyson, as did the two younger Wordsworth boys, who soon followed. She became a mother figure to them, a substitute parent for four displaced boys, the most constant adult figure in Wordsworth’s growing-up years, a loved figure whom he always cherished. She hadn’t been educated, nor had she read any books, though her ledgers show that she was at least literate. She had once worked in Scotland as a servant and was full of her experiences. Some people thought she tended to go on somewhat, when she started on her old tales, but William loved to hear them. The most surprising thing about her was the enormous freedom she allowed William. Even at the age of nine, when he had just arrived to lodge with her, he was out roaming the fields and the fells almost half the night. It was in general a very good school, which was no doubt why John Wordsworth had chosen it for his sons. Mrs Tyson, an old lady unused to children, was informal and permissive. She was a church-goer, but she didn’t try to indoctrinate young William. She allowed him to be himself.

  If you stand in the middle of Hawkshead today, carefully avoiding the hordes of tourists, it is easy to see what a prosperous business town it once was. The wool merchants have gone, but their houses remain, handsome buildings, grouped in small squares, or overhanging little cobbled lanes. Hawkshead is the prettiest town in the whole of the Lake District today, and by far the best preserved.

  But it is hard to imagine the former prosperity of the modest little building which was Hawkshead Grammar School. The town’s ancient school building is still there, neatly painted and preserved, with the original desks still in rows, the books on the shelves, but, alas, the pupils all gone. It is such a little building, yet it held a hundred boys when Wordsworth attended it, which is difficult to believe. Even more surprising, Hawkshead Grammar School was one of the north of England’s most successful and distinguished schools, sending several boys to Cambridge every year, many of whom went on to become prize-winning Fellows. It had been founded in 1585 by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, who’d been born locally. All lessons were free, although boys who came from outside the immediate neighbourhood (including the Wordsworth boys) had to pay cockpennies, an entrance fee of about a guinea a year. (It was called cockpenny because originally the headmaster collected the pennies and awarded a prize for the boy with the best fighting cock. Cock-fighting, which was particularly strong in Cumberland, Westmorland and north Lancashire, was not made illegal until 1849.) The school allowed up to twelve charity boys to get their lodgings free, as well as their education. It was in many ways typical of English grammar schools of the day. Even at the great public schools, boys lodged with dames. Boarding houses, run by masters, didn’t take over until the nineteenth century, which was when public schools generally became the way they are today.

  In the eighteenth century, the poor boys at Hawkshead, as at most schools, sat side by side on the crowded benches with the sons of the local gentry and professional people. The real nobs, of course, usually had their children educated at home by tutors. The successful, popular schools—and a school could lose its pupils and masters in just a decade, if it fell out of favour—were enormously crowded. There was only one large classroom at Hawkshead, plus two smaller ones above, and so the classes must have been large. (The big popular southern schools of the day, such as Sherborne and Shrewsbury, had at times seventy-five in a class and Eton once had two hundred in a class.)

  The basis of the education was Latin—hence the name grammar school. It was the world of Rome and grammar of Latin which had been the sign of the educated man and the entrance to all professions since medieval days. Most of all, Latin got you into the Church. Schoolmasters were clerics and a common route to becoming a bishop was to be a headmaster first.

  Hawkshead drew boys from all over the Lakeland area, from Carlisle, which had its own perfectly good grammar school, even more ancient than Hawkshead’s, down to Furness and north Lancashire. During Wordsworth’s days, judging by a list of names of those who donated library books before going up to university, the range was even wider, with boys coming from Edinburgh, Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester. The Edinburgh boys, two brothers, appear to have been the only sons of an aristocratic family (one of them later became ninth Earl of Stair). The ten or so charity boys were usually sons of local craftsmen (Mrs Tyson boasted that her husband Hugh had been a charity boy, though this is in doubt), but the majority had fathers who were clerics, lawyers or army officers, with the occasional woollen mill owner or even landscape painter.

  School, it seems, started at six o’clock in the morning in the summer, and at seven in the winter, which meant that old Mrs Tyson had to get them up in summer time at about five fifteen for breakfast, which more often than not was porridge. Just after eleven, they broke for lunch, which was boiled mutton, if they were lucky; then back for afternoon school from one till five. William used to get up even earlier than he needed in order to walk round the shores of Esthwaite Water, Hawkshead’s local lake, before school.

  He’d been at the school only two weeks, so he recounts in The Prelude, when one evening, in the twilight, hardly able to see the shore in the gloom, he came across a pile of clothes, left by someone who had apparently gone bathing. Next day, in the light, he came back and watched some men in boats, with grappling irons and long poles, fish out a drowned body. A rather nasty experience for a young boy, but the fact that he was only nine, and being allowed out at all hours of night and day, is also significant.

  It was what he loved, of course, wandering the countryside or taking part in all the rural activities. Hawkshead, unlike either Cockermouth or Penrith, is right in the heart of Lakeland, surrounded by fells and lakes. William skated every winter on Esthwaite Water, a shallow lake which freezes quickly, though in those days every winter seemed to be freezing. Today, our winters seem p
ositively Mediterranean by comparison. Even Windermere, Lakeland’s biggest lake, just four miles from Hawkshead, was often hard enough for skating. William joined in the hunt, and went searching for raven’s eggs, all of which makes very lyrical reading in The Prelude, though the incentive was probably monetary gain as much as anything else. Rewards were given for killing vermin, such as foxes (which could net five shillings a time) or ravens, though well-brought-up grammar school boys were not supposed to do this, under school rules. William loved fishing, and there’s a nice account of him persuading a fisherman to take him angling in the Duddon valley, which was a good ten miles away. They were away a whole day, crawling back late at night, with little William, exhausted, being given a piggy-back by the fisherman. The furthest he went, along with some schoolfellows, was down to Furness Abbey, some twenty miles away, but this time they hired horses. He also loved boating, racing his schoolfellows on Windermere or, on one occasion, stealing a boat on Ullswater for an evening row across the lake, till he came face to face with a huge, dark mountain, towering over him, and retreated, terrified, just as he had terrified himself imagining all sorts of horrors on Penrith Beacon.

  For well over a century, scholars and interested amateurs have had great fun trying to identify the people, such as pedlars, fellow schoolboys or discharged soldiers, described by Wordsworth in The Prelude, and many of them have been traced—even ones whom the poet admitted later had been amalgamations of several characters.

  William was very fond of sitting on the benches round the centre of Hawkshead, especially at the church, and of talking to the old men of the town, listening to their tales of the old days. Research has shown that a surprising number of old men lived in Hawkshead in those days. In 1785, for example, while Wordsworth was a schoolboy at the grammar school, nine of the twenty registered burials were of people aged from eighty to eighty-nine. In those days, of course, if you survived birth and early childhood—and in many towns up to half the newborn population died—then you had a good chance of living to a reasonable age.