William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  It was all excitement in those first few weeks at Cambridge, a mad whirl of new sensations, as William, the archetypal fresher, did the introductory rounds, accepting invitations, suppers and teas, conversations and counsel. He looked up all the old Hawkshead boys he knew; nine of them were there, which shows how well his little grammar school was doing in those days. Some of them were now terribly important, swaggering fellows, but they were all very friendly to the new boy from their old school. He paid a call on his tutor, hastened to a tailor, arranged to have his hair powdered (as the style then was for young Cambridge gentlemen), ordered silk stockings and turned himself into a dandy over-night, though one hardly old enough to shave, hardly able to disguise his lack of manhood. He roamed the famous colleges, proud of the spectacle, proud of himself, admiring the views, admiring himself. St John’s is not, architecturally, one of Cambridge’s finest colleges, and his room turned out to be little more than a cell above the kitchens, but, by pulling his bed to the little window, he could see an avenue of splendid elm-trees, and, by craning hard, he could see Trinity College and the statue of Newton, then the dominant influence in Cambridge teaching.

  Wordsworth couldn’t have had a better or happier start at Cambridge. It was true he arrived as a sizar, a sort of charity boy, one who paid reduced fees, but he later received a small scholarship. At one time, sizars had been forced to serve at table to pay their fees, but this had ceased by the time Wordsworth arrived. All the same, if only his father had lived, then he might not have needed to take the social status of a sizar. His uncles, who begrudged his small fees anyway, were sending him to Cambridge on the cheap.

  His good start was due to his schooling and to his connections. William Taylor, the young and brilliant headmaster at Hawkshead, whom William said was the person who had first encouraged him to write poetry, had only recently come down from Cambridge, where he’d been Second Wrangler in 1778 (second in the BA honours list), and therefore knew the Cambridge system. It was he who’d pushed the Hawkshead boys ahead in mathematics, knowing that was Cambridge’s obsession. Taylor had died, aged only thirty-two, in William’s second last year at school. William, with some other senior boys, had been called into his room, where he lay on his death-bed, and they’d each kissed him on the cheek. Years later, when William visited Taylor’s grave at Cartmel, he’d cried real tears, imagining he could hear his voice. One of the many things William owed to Taylor was that, when he arrived at Cambridge, he found himself a year ahead of everyone else in Euclid.

  As for good connections, having your uncle as a Fellow is naturally an asset, but there was also Edward Christian, another Fellow of St John’s, who, for one year, early in Wordsworth’s school days, had been headmaster at Hawkshead. He was also from Cockermouth, the brother of Fletcher Christian. At Cambridge, he was lecturing in law, and was soon to become Professor of Law. A year or so later, while still quite young and relatively unknown, he was chosen by the Wordsworth family to carry on their lawsuit against the might of the Lowthers Northerners generally were in powerful positions in Cambridge at the time, and were prejudiced in favour of boys from their old schools or counties.

  At the end of his first term, William was placed in the first class in his college examinations, despite dashing round Cambridge and enjoying himself, soaking up all the dazzle and novelty—a Dreamer who thought that Cambridge was a Dream. But by the end of his first year, in June 1788, he suddenly dropped to the second class. He had become completely disillusioned with Cambridge and had given up all attempts to follow a proper course of study, dropping his honours course and ignoring lectures, to the absolute bewilderment of his Uncle William and all his other well-wishers. Wilfully, he was throwing away every advantage. What had gone wrong? Had those fancy clothes and fancy life gone to his head?

  For the rest of his life, Wordsworth looked back on Cambridge with a mixture of anger and melancholy—when, that is, he looked back on it at all. In truth, he wrote and talked little about it, save to dismiss the Cambridge of his time as being wild and dissolute. His attack on it in The Prelude is, in parts, extremely savage. He tinkered around with this bit of The Prelude in later years, toning down his criticisms, blaming himself a bit more; but it is still very violent, describing the dons, for example, as ‘grotesque in character’.

  Cambridge, in those days, was indeed in a pretty sad state. There were two extremes of Cambridge life, each of which Wordsworth inspected in turn, observing at first hand their different degradations (though he didn’t really join in, so he says), and then he rejected both of them, one after the other.

  One of these extremes, the academic race, was followed by only a small proportion of the students. At the top, it was crumbling and corrupt, with absentee professors and non-lecturing Fellows, who mainly sat around, waiting for some ‘perk’ to come their way. Cambridge was still basically a training-ground for Anglican clerics, but most livings were in the hands of the politicians or of members of the landed aristocracy, such as the Lowthers, who had not only parliamentary boroughs, but clerical livings, in their gift. It was the Prime Minister who personally appointed bishops; so, when Pitt visited Cambridge, the Fellows positively crawled before him. Fellows would even curry favour with their pupils, if they were rich enough. One example was William Wilberforce, a particularly wealthy young student from Yorkshire, who was about to inherit greatness and therefore didn’t need to earn it. He’d recently been at St John’s, where he was a fellow-student of William’s Uncle William, and he was still his close friend (which shows how well the Rev. William had done). While there, the Fellows had actively encouraged Wilberforce to be idle, considering him to be a talented young man of fortune who did not need to work to earn his bread.

  The professors and masters of colleges were quick to follow any political wind, favouring the Whigs or the Tories, depending on who was in power. Dr Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, an important Cambridge figure of the day, managed to be reformer and reactionary in turn. At one and the same time, he held down his see in South Wales, the professorship of Divinity at Cambridge and a rich living in Leicestershire, while spending most of his time at his house on Windermere. He had previously been Professor of Chemistry, before procuring himself a DD and moving into Divinity, adroitly securing for himself the best clerical endowment of its kind.

  However, to get started on this road to riches and preferment, it was vital for a bright but less affluent or less well connected boy to do well in his examinations. The main examination at Cambridge, upon which everything depended, was the Mathematical Tripos. This may seem rather a strange speciality, and it infuriated many great Cambridge men before and after Wordsworth. Thomas Gray, the poet, had protested some fifty years earlier about the ridiculous emphasis on mathematics; and Thackeray, some fifty years afterwards, felt he would never master algebra and geometry, and left after only one year. The tradition dated back to Newton, Cambridge’s favourite son. There were separate college examinations (as St John’s, which held them every year), and there were other specialist chairs, such as History; but these were almost extras, for graduates or dilettantes. The Mathematical Tripos was what counted, and in the final BA honours examinations everyone who took part was listed in order of merit, from first to last. The top fifteen or so were called Wranglers, from Senior Wrangler down to Fifteenth Wrangler. The secondary honours were similarly graded, and there were many prizes and medals to be won. Cambridge was centuries ahead of the meritocratic society.

  It was vital to be high on the honours list and so get a fellowship. There were mental breakdowns, just as today, as people felt themselves slipping out of the race, but there was also a bit of fiddling, as wealthy or well-connected students were ‘huddled’ through their disputations (examinations on philosophical questions which were part of the Mathematical Tripos). You couldn’t actually fiddle your way on to the Wranglers’ part of the list, but to get a respectable position further down wasn’t difficult, either for the reasonably clever or for the wealthy but i
ndolent. The Tripos included moral philosophy and logic, as well as geometry, algebra and arithmetic. Cambridge considered itself rather advanced—its pre-eminence in science dates from these days—whereas at Oxford, where they were firmly bedded in Classical literature, it was as if Newton had never been born.

  William hated the syllabus, and felt it had nothing to do with him. If this was how you became a cleric, then he didn’t want to be one; and who would want to be a cleric anyway, once one had seen how they fought and crawled for sinecures and positions. He hated examinations and competition of all sorts. Such a view is more fashionable today, but in Wordsworth’s day the Church almost deified competition, usually referring to it as Emulation. By emulating your betters, you did better yourself. Wordsworth only ever remembered twice in his life being envious of someone. As a little boy, in a foot race in some sports, he’d tripped up his brother when he saw him getting ahead. The second time was at Cambridge, when for a moment he felt jealous of a fellow-student who was better at Italian than he was. Looking back as an old man, he could remember no other occasions. ‘I can sincerely affirm, that I am not indebted to emulation for my attainments, whatever they may be. I have from my youth cultivated the habit of valuing knowledge for its own sake.’

  The other extreme at Cambridge—and the one more widely pursued—was the social life. Even the studious did most of their studying in the vacation, as many do today, and looked upon the term as a time for fun. Wordsworth in The Prelude maintains he ‘observed’, not shared, the dissolute pleasures, but they were there and were well recorded by many of his contemporaries.

  Thomas Gray had had a few coarse tricks played on him as a Cambridge student, and he was horrified to see the young bucks place ‘women upon their heads in the streets at noon, break open shops and game in the coffee houses on Sundays’. The Tuns Tavern was ‘the scene of nightly orgies in which professors and Fellows set an example of roistering to the youth of the University’. Another poet, William Cowper, reported in 1785 that the universities contained nothing but ‘gamesters, jockeys, brothellers impure, spendthrifts and booted sportsmen’. Coleridge, referring to the 1790s, said that both the universities and the public schools were the homes of ‘vicious habits, unstained acts of intemperance or the degradations akin to intemperance’. Wordsworth was never as specific, apart from referring to ‘rioting, rotting and dissolute pleasures’. He must have been more appalled by Cambridge life than those students who came from the big, southern public schools, where brutality and other vices were almost as commonplace. Hawkshead, in every sense, had been a haven of innocence.

  The ‘bucks’, the wealthy undergraduates and those who tried to ape them, followed a life that was a mixture of effeminacy and violence. It was the fashion of the day for gentlemen to be obsessed by their clothes, and in Cambridge, as elsewhere, the trend-setters would spend the whole morning dressing. Little wonder that Wordsworth, despite his handful of home-made smart clothes, rushed straight out to get his hair done and order some more clothes, self-conscious about his homespun northern dress and manners.

  In those years, the only meal taken in college was dinner, which was at 2.30 in the afternoon; the undergraduates ate breakfast and supper in their rooms, or in the rooms of friends. As dinner was the social peak of the day, everyone made a big attempt to dress their best for it. Even Christopher Wordsworth, William’s younger brother, who soon followed him to Cambridge, spent forty minutes getting dressed for dinner, despite being the family swot. Christopher kept a diary of his Cambridge days; like almost everyone else, he went on from dinner in college to wine parties, which lasted all afternoon, in the rooms of his friends He usually managed to sober up enough to start working again at about six o’clock, reading the Classics for three or four hours before bed. As for the bucks, since dinner was immediately followed by afternoon wine parties, that meant no more work was done for the rest of the day. Thackeray, when he was up at Cambridge, admitted that there was literally no time for work, what with dressing all morning and drinking all afternoon and evening. As the day wore on, their smart clothes must have begun to suffer—which was no doubt why they had to spend so much time the next day getting ready again. The violence of those days was terrifying. The bucks, rioted in the colleges, breaking down people’s doors, roughing up sizars or anyone they felt like picking on, then going into the streets, breaking down shops and cracking the heads of anyone who got in their way. During Wordsworth’s first year a local drayman of the town was murdered by a gang of rioting students. As Coleridge and others remarked, once you’d seen the vice current amongst the privileged undergraduates, the streets of London could never shock you.

  Wordsworth admitted that in his first year he ‘sauntered, play’d, rioted’ along the streets and on one occasion, after a particularly heavy afternoon wine party, got drunk. How shocking. He was actually toasting Milton’s name at the time, so it was excusable, and he did manage to pull himself together and was able to race back to his college before the bell went at nine and the doors closed. But his brain had definitely reeled and it was ‘never so clouded by the fumes of wine before that hour or since’. Wordsworth was in fact virtually teetotal throughout his adult years, as is well recorded, but notice that he says ‘never so clouded’. If he’d literally never touched a drop again, he would simply have said ‘never clouded’, so perhaps he did have a few jars on other occasions in his Cambridge days.

  Throughout that first year, he felt himself very much the innocent abroad, the simple country lad. After a year’s excitement and novelty, he was rather glad, when the holidays came, to get back to his former innocent life. When he returned to Hawkshead for his first summer vacation in 1788, he doubtless needed a good rest as much as anything else, after his contact with the wild goings-on at Cambridge.

  What a welcome he got from old Mrs Tyson, his motherly dame, who insisted straight away that he should parade round the village, and walk round the fields and along the paths, to let everyone see what a fine young gentleman her little orphan lodger had turned into. He was a bit embarrassed, knowing what some of the locals would think of his gay attire, but he quite enjoyed going the rounds, shouting curt greetings to the farmers, half-way across a field, knowing they’d be amazed when they’d straightened up and taken it all in, but also knowing they wouldn’t say much, not being given to such social ceremonies. He was particularly pleased to see again the old ferryman on Windermere, one who had taken him across the lake so many times over the years, going back and forth to school. Naturally, he went to see his school friends, regaling them with his adventures and his dazzling Cambridge life.

  Above all, it was easing himself into his old physical surroundings that pleased him most—to be in the only place he knew of as home, rushing upstairs to stretch himself out on his old bed, joining the other student lodgers at Mrs Tyson’s big communal dining-table, feeling the garden and the trees, walking round Esthwaite Water, luxuriating in nature, returning to his real self again. Or was it his real self? He was a trifle confused, worried by the new pleasures he’d seen and enjoyed. He realized his imagination had slept, while he’d sauntered and idled round Cambridge. He half blamed himself for his rather hedonistic year, his vanity and his weakness, for enjoying the gaudy nights—and some of them, he had to admit, he had enjoyed.

  As he explored his old haunts, he felt a conflict of pleasures, wondering what was true or false, real or affected. He started to write some verse again, which he hadn’t done at Cambridge, and began a poem called An Evening Walk. His habit then, which continued throughout his life, was to compose aloud, trying out the lines in the open air as he strode along. There’s a nice, lightly humoured section in The Prelude about walking with his dog, or at least Mrs Tyson’s household dog on his return to Hawkshead. (Everything to do with Hawkshead in The Prelude is joyful—a joy to read and a pleasure to realize his joy—whereas other sections, such as that in Cambridge, are confused and melancholy.) The dog always walked with him, but a few paces ahe
ad, and when it saw someone coming, it always turned and gave William notice, time to compose his face and gait, so that no-one would see and hear him in full spate and suspect he was crazy.

  He bought an umbrella during his summer holidays in Hawkshead, putting it on his bill at Mrs Tyson’s, along with £2 17s for nine weeks’ board and 1s 6d for the hire of a horse. Even to this day, a man carrying an umbrella in the Lake District is thought a bit soft, but in 1789 it was positively effeminate. It must have been a habit he’d picked up in Cambridge, though even there it was something of a novelty. (The first man to carry an umbrella in the streets of London was Jonas Hanway in 1750; he was ridiculed by passers-by and abused by cabmen.) We don’t know if William took it with him around Hawkshead, which would seem very strange for an open-air boy. Perhaps he’d just bought it to stun them when he got back to Cambridge. It shows that even in his dress there was a conflict of styles.

  He entered once again into the spirit of the rural social life, always having fancied himself when it came to dancing, and went to several ‘promiscuous routs’, whatever that meant. One assumes it referred to drinking rather than anything else, though one of his first impressions, on returning to Hawkshead, was to notice which pretty girls had gone plain and which plain ones were now pretty. The local yeomen farmers had barn dances, with the village fiddler doing his bit, and Wordsworth went to these. There was no social discrimination. The boys at the grammar school were still very much village boys, part of the community. But now he was a Cambridge buck, as far as the local quality could see, he also got invited to the smarter parties in the smarter houses by some of the smart, new people. Perhaps that was when he took his umbrella.