William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  The struggle to identify Wordsworth’s cottage in Hawkshead, the one where he lived with old Mrs Tyson, has been one of the most popular searches for easily a hundred years. Tradition for a long time pointed to a little cottage right in the middle of the town, and it is named as Wordsworth’s cottage on the local picture postcards. Ernest de Selincourt, the great pre-war Wordsworthian scholar, believed this was where William had lived with Mrs Tyson, but a discovery by Mrs Heelis, a local sheep farmer who lived nearby at Sawrey, showed that Ann Tyson had in fact lived at Colthouse, about half a mile away. Mrs Heelis found Mrs Tyson’s old ledgers, now an invaluable source for all Wordsworth scholars, and traced her home to Colthouse. (Mrs Heelis is better known to the public as Beatrix Potter.) Mary Moorman, in the first volume of her classic study on Wordsworth, published in 1957, based on this discovery, and on clues in The Prelude, her belief that Wordsworth had spent all his school-days with Mrs Tyson in Colthouse. Today, a compromise appears to have been reached amongst the experts, though naturally new evidence, or new fashions, might change all this. It is now thought that Wordsworth lived with Mrs Tyson in the middle of Hawkshead for his first few years, but that he moved with her to Colthouse by 1784, when her husband died. So, both places are correct. The post-cards needn’t be scrapped.

  William’s life with Mrs Tyson was fairly frugal. Though other boys who lodged with her occasionally had cakes or bottles of wine on their bill, William lived the simple life, most of it in ‘pennyless poverty’. Candles and coals were extras which they could rarely afford, though he usually had a few shillings to spare for such luxuries at the beginning of each term on his return from the school holidays. The summer holidays were probably spent in Penrith, while Christmas was spent with his father in Cockermouth.

  The Cockermouth connection ceased, and a more frugal life began, with the death of William’s father in 1783. He had been about his Lowther business in the southern part of the Lakes, in the Millom area, where he was Coroner, when he lost his way in bad weather while riding home from Broughton-in-Furness to Cockermouth. He was forced to spend the night without shelter on the slopes of Cold Fell. He suffered a severe chill from which he never recovered. William said later that his father had never kept his usual cheerfulness of mind since the death of his wife. The official cause of death was given as dropsy.

  William’s father died on 30 December 1783, aged forty-two, during the boys’ Christmas holidays. William remembered afterwards how he’d waited impatiently at Hawkshead for the ponies to arrive. Transport was always a source of trouble at Hawkshead, with everyone dependent on horses to take them home. This time, the horses sent by his father did not turn up, though William had been sitting on the road for a long time, moaning about their absence—only to arrive home and find his father mortally ill, much to his anguish and mortification.

  John Wordsworth’s death merited only one line of appreciation in the weekly Cumberland Pacquet: ‘Jan 6, 1784. Last Tuesday, about half past 12 o’clock, Mr Wordsworth, Attorney, of Cockermouth, departed this life after a short confinement. He lived deservedly esteemed and died universally lamented.’ Dorothy said later that it was ‘mortifying to my Brothers and me to find that amongst all those who visited at my father’s house he had not one real friend’.

  Worst of all, he left no real money. His estate, in theory, was handsome enough, even though he died before his prime earning years: it totalled £10,485, an impressive amount for those days. But, on investigation, it turned out that almost all of it was made up of debts people owed him—chiefly his employer, Sir James Lowther. He did leave a bit of property, but the rents were exceedingly modest. His immediate effects and belongings were sold for £328 and the cash in hand proved to be £225. What was missing was the large sum of £4,625, owed by Lowther. It turned out that he had never been paid for his Lowther work, a mysterious state of affairs which has never been satisfactorily explained. There was virtually nothing to split between the five children, though the family began legal proceedings against the Earl of Lonsdale, as Sir James Lowther became later that year. This legal action, which proved very costly in itself, became a huge, dark cloud, a veritable albatross, which hung over the Wordsworth children from then on, blighting their lives in many ways.

  They were now truly orphans, though they had felt as if they were ever since the death of their mother, with the added embarrassment of poverty and complete dependence on their relations for survival. The children found themselves under the guardianship of two uncles: Uncle Richard Wordsworth and, worse still, Uncle Kit, the Penrith uncle William had never liked. They’d always looked upon William as a bit of a burden anyway, because of his personality. Now they would have to pay for his education too. Poor William. He and the two elder boys attended the funeral. Christopher, the youngest, was still at Penrith, being too young for Hawkshead Grammar School. Dorothy missed attending the funeral as well, being away in Yorkshire with relations.

  She had felt hardest done by of all, being separated from her brothers, but was finding that her life with her Halifax relations wasn’t as bad as she’d feared it would be. They were kind and considerate, unlike the Penrith relations, and she made many good local friends, though all the time she was wondering what was happening to her brothers. During her father’s lifetime, they’d usually managed to be at home in Cockermouth for those Christmas holidays, but Dorothy never made it, which was very sad, especially as her birthday was on Christmas Day:

  I can almost tell where every Birth day of my life was spent, from a very early time. The Day was always kept by my Brothers with rejoicing in my father’s house but for six years, the interval between My Mother’s death and his, I was never once at home, which I cannot think of without regret for many causes and particularly that I have been thereby put out of the way of many recollections in common with my Brothers of that period of life which, whatever it maybe actually as it goes along, generally appears more delightful than any other when it is over.…

  Back in Hawkshead, William was indeed having a delightful time and could forget the unpleasantness of the Penrith household. His night-and-day wanderings continued throughout his school-days, though he doesn’t appear to have neglected his school work. He never won any prizes, but at this period of his life he was a keen reader, when he wasn’t out roaming the lakes and fells. ‘Had I been born in a class which would have deprived me of what is called a liberal education, it is not unlikely that, being strong in body, I should have taken to a way of life such as that in which my “Pedlar” passed the greater part of his days.’

  He had quite an active social life as well, as he got into his late ’teens. He spent many a wet evening with the other boys in his lodgings, playing cards round the peat fire, and he became very fond of dancing. The school didn’t arrange this, but a Mr Mingay had for a time a dancing academy in Hawkshead which all four Wordsworth boys attended. Mr Mingay, a gentleman of several talents, also taught fencing and French. In The Prelude there are several references to late-night dances, parties with strawberries and cream and other jollifications. But were there any girls? William did go out walking during at least one school holiday in Penrith with Mary Hutchinson, one of the Hutchinson sisters who’d been at the Penrith dame school with him, but he doesn’t appear to have had any lady friends in Hawkshead. The local county girls certainly looked to Hawkshead School to produce suitable beaux for their dances, but William seems not to have become attached to any girl in particular. The scholastic sleuths have been through every possible Hawkshead record over the last hundred years, but still no girls have yet been turned up.

  William’s first poetry was written in 1784, when he was aged fourteen, as a school exercise, on a subject beloved by schoolmasters to this day—what I did in my summer holidays. The lines don’t survive, which is probably just as well, but some verses which he wrote the following year do survive; again, these were written as a school exercise to celebrate the school’s bicentenary.

  After that, William started
to write verses on his own account. The first poetry which he composed spontaneously, he later recalled, was written after walking home late from a dance. Most of his visions, his dream-like trances, occurred on his walks, even on the half-mile or so walk from his lodgings in Colthouse to school, though he usually extended this to a five-mile walk by going round the lake. ‘I was often unable,’ he said years later, ‘to think of external things as having external existence and I communed with all I saw as something not apart from but inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality.’

  The great reunion with Dorothy was due to take place in the summer holidays of 1787, after William had finished his final term at Hawkshead School. She’d recently been sent back to Penrith from Halifax, to live with her grandparents and help out in the shop. Dorothy wasn’t at all pleased at this, as she’d enjoyed her years at Halifax, apart from the separation from her brothers, and had friends whom she was to keep all her life. It is lucky for us, however, that she did go back to Penrith, for, from now on, the best running commentary on the activities of William Wordsworth is the one supplied by Dorothy: an incessant letter-writer who, almost every day of her life, sent off two or three huge letters to her friends, keeping them in touch with what she was doing.

  As the summer holidays approached, Dorothy was in a fearful state, waiting and longing to see her long-lost brothers; it would be her first meeting with them for nine years.

  I was for a whole week kept in expectation of my brothers who staid at school all that time after the vacation begun owing to ill nature of my uncle (Kit) who would not send horses for them because when they wrote they did not happen to mention them, and only said when they should break up which was always before sufficient. This was the beginning of my mortifications for … indeed nobody but myself expressed one wish to see them. At last however they were sent for, but not till my Brother William had hired a horse for himself because he thought some one must be ill.

  The brothers at last turned up and Dorothy had many happy hours together with them, especially with William. They read some newly published poems by Robert Burns, which had just come out in the Kilmarnock edition. A friend had recommended them to Dorothy, and William got the book for her from a local book club in Penrith.

  A few weeks later, in a letter to a friend, Dorothy gave an interesting pen portrait of her four brothers and their characters. She was sixteen at the time.

  They are just the boys I could wish them, they are so affectionate and so kind to me as makes me love them more every day. Wm and Christopher are very clever boys at least so they appear in the partial eyes of a Sister. No doubt I am partial and see virtues in them that by everybody else will pass unnoticed. John, who is to be the sailor, has a most excellent heart, he is not so bright as either Wm or Christopher but he has very good common sense and is very well calculated for the profession he has chosen. Richard, the oldest, I have seen, he is equally affectionate and good but he is far from being as clever as William, but I have no doubts of his succeeding in his businesses for he is very diligent and far from being dull. Many a time have Wlm, J, C and myself shed tears together, tears of the bitterest sorrow, we all of us, each day feel more sensibly the loss we sustained when we were deprived of our parents and each day we do receive fresh insults.

  The insults were long and hurtful and Dorothy always felt mortified (one of her favourite words) by the servants, who obviously took the lead from the uncle and grandparents and continually abused them, especially about their poverty, pointing out that they were living on charity. They had been hoping that Lord Lonsdale would at least pay some of his debts on account, but they’d just learned that he refused to pay anything at all. Dorothy’s letters are full of references to their troubles:

  I daresay our fortunes have been weighed thousands of times at the tea table and I have no doubt but they always concluded their conversations with ‘they have nothing to be proud of.…

  We are found fault with every hour of the day both by the servants and my Grandfather and Grandmother, the former of whom never speaks to us but when he scolds which is not seldom. We have been told thousands of times that we are liars.…

  My Uncle Kit has taken a dislike to my Brother Wm and never takes any notice of any of us.…

  William, at the time, was apparently thinking of going into the law, like his father and grandfather before him, and as Richard was going to do. Dorothy, however, did have her little worries about him: ‘He wishes very much to be a Lawyer if his health will permit, but he is troubled with violent head aches and a pain in his side, but I hope they will leave him in a little time.’

  Dorothy was naturally very upset when they all left Penrith at the end of the summer holidays. ‘I cannot paint to you my distress at their Departure. I can only tell you that for a few hours I was absolutely miserable, a thousand tormenting fears rushed upon me, the approaching Winter and the ill nature of my Grandfather and Uncle Christopher.’

  In the autumn of 1787, William was due to take up residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. He was a liberal and well-educated young man of the times, well ahead for his years in mathematics and Classics, a noisy, sociable fellow with his friends, but given to strange periods of introspection and silences. There is no doubt he had enormously enjoyed the freedom of his days at Hawkshead, a great relief from the constraints of Penrith. The strange visions, the sudden feelings of being at one with nature, could possibly have contained an element of escape, subjugating the deeper fears and insecurities caused by the deaths of his mother and father, the lack of love from his relations and his worries about the future. His guardians still found him moody and ill-tempered, hard to like, hard to control and with a definite streak of rebellion in him. They made it plain that they considered they were doing him a great favour by continuing to pay for his education. And they made it even plainer that he had better curb his wayward ways and work hard at Cambridge.

  SKATING

  These lines are taken from The Prelude, begun early in 1799 and finished in 1805, and are about one of his greatest pleasures from his Hawkshead school days, a sport he continued throughout his life.

  All shod with steel,

  We hiss’d along the polish’d ice, in games

  Confederate, imitative of the chace

  And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,

  The Pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare.

  Not seldom from the uproar I retired

  Into a silent bay, or sportively

  Glanced sideways, leaving the tumultuous throng,

  To cut across the image of a star

  That gleam’d upon the ice: and oftentimes

  When we had given our bodies to the wind,

  And all the shadowy banks, on either side,

  Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still

  The rapid line of motion; then at once

  Have I, reclining back upon my heels,

  Stopp’d short, yet still the solitary Cliffs

  Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll’d

  With visible motion her diurnal round;

  Behind me did they stretch in solemn train

  Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch’d

  Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

  3

  Cambridge

  1787–1790

  WORDSWORTH set off by coach for Cambridge in October 1787, accompanied by his uncle, the Rev. William Cookson, and his cousin, John Myers, who was also going up to St John’s College. His Uncle William was his mother’s younger brother, a young man of thirty-three who’d done very well for himself, considering he was a draper’s son. He’d had a brilliant career at Cambridge, was now a Fellow of St John’s and had for a time been a tutor to three of the royal children. He was obviously destined for a nice living somewhere, one of the plum country rectories which his college controlled, a step which w
ould no doubt in the end lead to even higher things. He’d been in Penrith most of the summer holidays, which had been a welcome surprise for Dorothy and William. He’d taken a great interest in Dorothy, helping her to learn French and arithmetic, a pleasant change from shirt-mending and serving in the shop. He’d even been kind to William (unlike his elder brother, the horrid Uncle Kit) and was keen to help him at Cambridge and with his future career, outlining the various stages ahead for a bright but impecunious young gentleman like William. Do well at the books, my boy, get a good degree and then a fellowship. That will give you an income till you get ordained, and then you’ll be secure for life. William at least must have considered this advice, during those long hours as the coach rolled south, for he very soon gave up all thoughts of a legal career.

  William had with him in his trunk some new clothes, which Dorothy had made for him. Ann Tyson, before he had left her in Hawkshead, had also got a few things ready for him. She’d charged him 4s 1 1/2d for velvet, which she’d had made into a jacket for him, and some silk at 4s 9d for a waistcoat and stock. He might have been a simple country boy, but he didn’t want to look a complete bumpkin when he arrived in Cambridge.

  They’d gone about two hundred miles on their coach trip when William had a rather nasty experience—quite shocking really, for a country boy who’d led a secluded life. In the town of Grantham, or it may have been Stamford, neighbouring busy little coaching towns on the Great North Road, both of which must have appeared equally wicked to William, he heard for the first time in his life the distinct sounds of women swearing and blaspheming. Even worse, he saw ‘abandoned women’, given over to ‘open shame’ and ‘public vice’. Goodness knows what the Rev. William said. Perhaps he was more used to such sights than his seventeen-year-old nephew. England at the time supported a ‘great army of prostitutes’, according to G.M. Trevelyan, and the harlot’s cry was heard in almost every town. William, as he observed rather sadly in The Prelude, saw worse later: ‘Afterwards a milder sadness on such spectacles attended.’