William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  However, Coleridge at the time was in no sense dependent on drugs, taking them only on isolated occasions when he didn’t feel well. They were all living a healthy outdoor life, extremely active in every sense, not just in their walking tours in the surrounding countryside, but in their creative writing. It was for Coleridge a meteoric year—a never-to-be-equalled year of abundance, when poems and ideas flowed from his pen. Wordsworth had also been ignited, but he had always been a slower burner. He was by now almost twenty-eight—an old man by poetic standards, when you consider how many young poetic prodigies there have been. But though, in his careful northern way, he was slow to start, the meeting with Coleridge coincided with the beginning of a much longer spell of inspired creation than that enjoyed by his friend.

  Amongst the radical friends who came to see the Wordsworths and Coleridge was John Thelwall, who had been tried in London on a charge of high treason, but acquitted. They talked noisily and heatedly long into the night with him, about revolution and the state of the war and the latest happenings in poor old France. What with their strange nocturnal habits, the north-country accents of the Wordsworths and Dorothy’s dark complexion, it is not surprising that some locals decided they were not just English Jacobins, but French spies. It is all rather laughable now, but it has to be remembered that England was at war, a known radical element was stirring up insurrection, and thoughts of invasion were in everyone’s mind.

  In August 1797, a local doctor sent the following account of his suspicions to the Duke of Portland, the Home Secretary:

  On the 8th instant I took the liberty to acquaint your grace with a very suspicious business concerning an emigrant family who have contrived to get possession of a mansion house at Alfoxden. I am since informed that the Master of the house has no wife with him but only a woman who passes for his Sister. The man has Camp Stools which he and his visitors take with them, when they go about the country upon their nocturnal or diurnal excursions which they have been heard to say were almost finished. They have been heard to say they should be rewarded for them, and were very attentive to the River near them.… These people may possibly be under-agents to some principal in Bristol.

  The plot thickened, so much so that a Home Office secret agent, a Mr G. Walsh, was sent down to keep an eye on the suspected spies and write a full report on their activities. The official Home Office correspondence is proof that all this happened; the details have been invaluable to literary students in furnishing details of William’s, Dorothy’s and Coleridge’s life at the time and of the visitors who came to see them.

  Walsh took up his quarters in the local inn at Stowey and began to spy on them, lying behind sand-dunes when they were on the seashore, listening to Wordsworth and Coleridge discussing someone called Spy Nozy—which convinced him he was on the right track, since he did not realize they were discussing Spinoza. Walsh took a statement from a man who’d waited at their table one evening when they had a large party of guests at Alfoxden. ‘There was a little stout man with dark cropt hair and wore a white hat and glasses [probably Thelwall] who after dinner got up and talked so loud and in such passion that I was frightened and did not like to go near them since.’ Such a large dinner did take place, though it doesn’t sound their normal style to have someone waiting, but Thomas Poole was there and perhaps paid for the dinner.

  Walsh sounds rather like a down-trodden John le Carré secret agent, sent from London to trail round after some rural eccentrics for no apparent reason. In the end, he realized they weren’t either French or ‘immigrants’, though they might be harmful, all the same: ‘I think this will turn out no French affair but a mischiefous gang of disaffected Englishmen.’

  Although the scare blew over, it was probably one of the reasons why the Wordsworths’ lease on Alfoxden was not renewed at the end of the year. They had certainly worried and distressed the local people and the owners didn’t want them back. The Wordsworths had nowhere else to go, as they couldn’t afford another cottage, unless it was very cheap. Basil Montagu had not been paying the money he owed them and not all the funds from the Calvert legacy had yet materialized. The only thing that tied them to the West Country was Coleridge’s presence. ‘What may be our destination I cannot say. We have no particular reason to be attached to the neighbourhood of Stowey,’ William wrote, ‘but the society of Coleridge.’

  Coleridge had also been having problems over money, since his own magazine had failed. However, Tom and Josiah Wedgwood, of the pottery family, offered him an annuity of £150 a year. All three poets, Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge, had now been presented with handsome annuities by friends—people of their own age who, though not especially interested in literature, had been persuaded by the poets’ talents and worthiness to give them enough money to save them from the ordinary mundane problems of earning a living. There were no public patrons in those days: no Arts Councils or writers’ fellowships. The only way for a young man of no means to get a helping hand was to find a patron. All three of our poets achieved this without having published anything of public note—certainly without having made names for themselves. It says a lot for their personal magnetism.

  Coleridge’s annuity, the Wedgwoods said, would release him from the need to become a Unitarian preacher, which had been his latest plan, as a way of providing an income to support himself, his wife and now their two children. But hardly had he received the money when he devised another plan. ‘We have come to a resolution, Coleridge, Mrs Coleridge, my Sister, and myself of going to Germany,’ William wrote to an old friend, James Losh, inviting him and also his wife to join the party. ‘We propose to pass the two ensuing years in order to acquire the German language and to furnish ourselves with a tolerable stock of information in natural science. May I venture a wish that she [Mrs Losh] would consent to join this little colony?’

  To earn enough money for their trip to Germany, Wordsworth and Coleridge got down to compiling a book of poems which they then sold to Cottle. It was Cottle’s offer of thirty guineas for the book which was their specific reason for producing it, and for making them hurry to complete enough poems in time. The volume was Lyrical Ballads, the single most influential book of poetry in the history of English literature. By the time it came out, in September 1798, they were already in Germany.

  EXPOSTULATION AND REPLY

  These verses are from ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’ which were written in June 1798 and appeared in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. It was based on a conversation Wordsworth had with Hazlitt when he was visiting Coleridge in the West Country, though Wordsworth transposed the setting to the Lake District. They ‘got into a metaphysical argument’ with Hazlitt extolling the virtues of books while Wordsworth replied, ‘Let Nature be your teacher.’

  WHY, William, on that old grey stone,

  Thus for the length of half a day,

  Why, William, sit you thus alone,

  And dream your time away?

  One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,

  When life was sweet, I knew not why,

  To me my good friend Matthew spake,

  And thus I made reply:

  ‘The eye—it cannot choose but see;

  We cannot bid the ear be still;

  Our bodies feel, where’er they be,

  Against or with our will.

  One impulse from a vernal wood

  May teach you more of man,

  Of moral evil and of good,

  Than all the sages can.

  Enough of Science and of Art;

  Close up those barren leaves;

  Come forth, and bring with you a heart

  That watches and receives.’

  7

  Germany and ‘Lyrical Ballads’

  1798–1799

  MRS COLERIDGE didn’t go to Germany. She was dropped from the party at the last moment, though Coleridge set off with William and Dorothy, half promising to send for his wife and the two children later on, when he’d got settl
ed. Instead, a local friend of Coleridge’s from Stowey, John Chester, made up the foursome.

  ‘Chester was ill the whole time,’ wrote Coleridge about the voyage in his notebook. ‘Wordsworth was shockingly ill! Miss Wordsworth worst of all—vomiting and groaning and crying the whole time—and I neither sick nor giddy but gay as a lark.’ And that’s roughly how it all went during the whole of their German adventure.

  The Wordsworths had very little money, and, before leaving, they tried to sell William’s copy of Gilpin’s Guide to the Lake District—a treasured possession, as William loved all travel books. Even so, the Wedgwoods had to advance them a loan of £110 so that they could go at all. Coleridge, on the other hand, now had his Wedgwood annuity and was able to enjoy every minute of his stay in Germany, getting himself lots of invitations and throwing himself fully into German life. One of the attractions of Germany for English people was that they could roam anywhere in that country in safety, whereas most of the rest of Europe was being overrun by Napoleon.

  The English Channel being too dangerous because of the war, they sailed from Yarmouth to Hamburg, where they all spent a few days, meeting some local poets, being upset by the bad smells, looking at the sights and wondering in amazement at a street full of prostitutes (already a great attraction for all visitors to Hamburg). Then Coleridge and Wordsworth separated. It seems a strange decision, but as the relevant letters have disappeared, the reasons can only be guessed at. It could be that they thought they would learn more German by separating. Together, they would be speaking English all the time. Perhaps they just wanted to see different places. Anyway, Coleridge and his friend went off to the university town of Ratzeburg, where they had letters of introduction, while the Wordsworths moved a bit further south to the small town of Goslar, near Hanover, not far from the present East German border.

  Goslar was an old imperial town, where the royal courts had once been held, and was supposed to have romantic associations and be very pretty, situated right on the edge of the Hartz Mountains. William and Dorothy found it decidedly unromantic, unbearably cold, very dull, very cheerless. They wanted to live with a German family and take part in local life, but could find only a lodging-house where they were ill fed, ignored and lacked any books, as there turned out to be no library in the town. There’s one remark in passing by Dorothy, describing how she ‘carried Kubla to a fountain where I drank some excellent water’, which shows that some sense of humour (Kubla Khan=water can) was retained, despite all the disappointments.

  Most of the time, they were exceedingly poor and one of William’s constant worries was that innkeepers and shopkeepers were just waiting to cheat him, a feeling which he always had when travelling abroad. They were in fact too poor to be worth cheating. On one occasion, when they’d been wandering the German countryside, they were taken for vagrants and Dorothy was arrested and put inside a tower at the gates of a town, till William returned and was able to prove their identity. In general, their life in Germany seems to have been totally isolated. ‘My hope was that I should be able to learn German as I learn’d French,’ wrote William. ‘In this I have been woefully deceived. I acquired more French in two months than I should acquire German in five years living as we have lived.’ Of course, in France he had enjoyed the advantage of living en famille.

  Coleridge, meanwhile, was amongst the nobs, dining out with counts and countesses, jabbering away in German, having a good time. He was in correspondence with the Wordsworths, and so he soon knew how badly William was faring. ‘He might as well have been in England as at Goslar, in the situation which he chose and with his unseeking manners. His taking his sister with him was a wrong step.… Sister here is considered as only a name for mistress. Still, male acquaintances he might have had, and had I been at Goslar I would have had them; but W, God love him! seems to have lost his spirits and almost his inclination for it.’

  Dorothy herself realized she might be a handicap to William—not because people might think she was his mistress, or because she put off potential girl friends for him, but because, as a single person, William might have got more invitations. ‘There is no society at Goslar, it is a lifeless town and it seems that here in Germany a man travelling alone may do very well but if his wife or sister goes with him, he must give entertainments. So we content ourselves with reading German … plenty of dry walks. William is very industrious; his mind is always active, indeed too much so; he overwearies himself and suffers from pain and weakness in the side.’

  William’s pain in the side was a familiar symptom, indicating that he was working hard, usually revising. It is difficult to know whether he imagined the pain or not, as it never led to any serious illness, but once he started on the poetry, his side started hurting. Coleridge suspected it was hypochondria. We are, incidentally, well supplied with copious information about their little ailments from now on, as Dorothy had begun a daily journal in Alfoxden, which she continued for a short time in Germany, though her letters anyway always gave the latest details of the state of their bowels, as well as headaches and assorted pains in the side. Blinding headaches were Dorothy’s speciality: and they were often so bad that she had to lie down.

  Starved of books to read, William decided to write his own, and these four months in Germany were an enormously active and fertile time for him. Going to a foreign country made him write about his native land—about the Lake District, his school-days, his childhood memories. It is a common reaction. You realize what you had, once you’ve left it.

  The poems about Lucy are perhaps Wordsworth’s best-known work which he did in Germany, along with ‘Nutting’ and the Matthew poems, but the most important work was the beginning of The Prelude. He was stuck in that freezing cold lodging-house, forced to wear an overcoat constantly to keep warm, with no friends and no social or intellectual contacts, apart from Dorothy. It was 1799, the last year of the century. His thirtieth birthday was in the offing. It seemed a good time to take stock. Coleridge had suggested some time before that he should write a philosophical poem, and so William started writing it for Coleridge, addressing it to him personally.

  Dorothy also appears a lot in the other poems he started writing in Germany and she is often thought to have been an element in the origin of Lucy. ‘Strange fits of passion have I known’ and ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’ were both written in this year. Strange stuff to write about your sister, but the Lucy figure in the end dies, which is equally bizarre. Perhaps Lucy was part-based on some unknown girl who had died. One possible friend (who had died three years earlier, in 1796) was Mary Hutchinson’s sister, Margaret, a friend from the Penrith days. Literary scholars are still turning over these Lucy poems, looking for clues, tracking down the influences.

  William and Dorothy left Goslar in February 1799, heading for England. Germany had proved excellent for work, if dreary for their personal life; but while William was there he at last decided where he would like to live. He wanted to go back to the north of England, preferably the Lake District.

  Lyrical Ballads had come out while William was away, but there was no crowd of worshippers at Yarmouth quayside to greet them on their return from Germany, no gentlemen with green eye-shades from the Morning Post, eager for some suitable comment.

  Joseph Cottle, their young Bristol bookseller, born in 1770, the same year as William, was the publisher of the first works of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth, a distinction which in later years he managed to boast about, though at the time it ruined him as a publisher. As far as he was concerned, Lyrical Ballads was a failure. At first, he wrote vaguely hopeful notes to William, giving no details, but saying things looked encouraging, and William wrote back, demanding to know exactly how many copies had been sold. In the end, Cottle had to admit that he had already remaindered most of the five hundred copies which he’d published: ‘The sale was so slow and the severity of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion … seemed ordained. I parted with the greatest proportion of the 500,
at a loss, to Mr Arch, a London bookseller.’

  Cottle then ceased publishing and transferred all his copyrights in the books he’d published to Longmans. The value of the copyright of Lyrical Ballads was assessed as nil. When William heard this, he asked Cottle to recover the copyright and transfer it to him and Coleridge, which Cottle did.

  Three reviews had appeared after publication, all of them poor; it was probably the earliest, which was very critical, that caused Cottle to sell out. This review was by Southey, of all people; but then Coleridge had fallen out with him and Wordsworth had been rather horrid about him and his Joan of Arc. Southey thought that the poems had failed, ‘not because the language of conversation is little adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure, but because it has been tried upon uninteresting subjects’. He was particularly harsh about Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, calling it absurd and unintelligible.

  William wrote to Cottle:

  Southey’s review I have seen. He knew that I published those poems for money and money alone. He knew that money was of importance to me. If he could not conscientously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task of reviewing it.