William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  Coleridge had by now a third child in his family, his only daughter Sara, who was born just six months before the Wordsworths’ first babe. All of the Coleridge children became constant visitors to Dove Cottage, often being left with the Wordsworths for many weeks at a time. When Dorothy is describing their own little Johnny, she can’t avoid including some digs at the Coleridge household: ‘He likes dearly to be laid upon his back on the floor, kicking and sprawling like a Merry Andrew such as they make for children and hang against the wall with strings to pull up their legs with a jerk. We bathe him every morning—he sobs bitterly but never cries yet in dressing after it he sometimes screams lustily and is in a violent passion. I believe Sara Coleridge was never in a passion in her life, she is the very soul of meekness.’

  Dorothy rather disapproved of the Coleridge methods of child care. All three Coleridge children were highly precocious and advanced, with little Hartley appearing to be a child prodigy, already being known by some as ‘The Philosopher’ at the age of only six. Dorothy thought the children were rather repressed, with too much learning and not enough outdoor life, though she was very fond of them personally and enjoyed looking after them at Dove Cottage.

  Just two months after the birth of John, William, Dorothy and Coleridge set off on a six-week tour of Scotland. This would appear to have been hard on Mary—left behind while they had a good time—but neither she nor they seemed to think so. They considered they’d done well to wait until after the birth, when they made special arrangements for Joanna Hutchinson, Mary’s younger sister, to move in and keep her company. (They had panicked slightly when Sarah, their first choice, couldn’t come, but Joanna had agreed to help instead.)

  William had been to Scotland on a very brief visit a couple of years previously, when his friend Montagu had re-married, but the other two had never been there. Dorothy was very excited, but Coleridge was worried, wondering if six weeks in bad weather in the north might bring on all his illnesses again. The tour was in fact planned for the good of Coleridge’s health, as much as anything—a change of scene to buck him up, though he was convinced that only the Mediterranean sunshine would do that.

  The Wordsworths bought an Irish jaunting car, a sign of their improved financial position, though the horse that was sold with it was rather old and awkward, as was the vehicle itself. William sat at the front on a sort of dicky box, doing the driving, while Dorothy and Coleridge sat behind, their backs to the centre of the road, with all the luggage stored beneath. There was no protection from the elements—no enclosed space where they could shelter—but it was better than being a pedestrian, carrying your belongings in a handkerchief on your head, as William had done when he’d gone off on his first tour, thirteen years before. It was an interesting and important trip, both stimulating and depressing, which brought several things into the open.

  In Carlisle, they witnessed a strange event, the culmination of a story that had kept the whole nation agog for several months. A gentleman calling himself the Hon. Augustus Hope, MP, had married the daughter of an innkeeper in Buttermere, Mary Robinson, a young girl of eighteen, known as the ‘Beauty of Buttermere’. He took her on a lavish spending spree, staying at all the best places in the Lake District, such as the ‘Royal Oak’ at Keswick, flashing his smart visiting-card and travelling in his smart carriage, until the police caught up with him and the cultured lordling turned out to be a downright blackguard, a confidence trickster from the West Country called Hatfield, who had left a string of broken hearts and fatherless children all over the country.

  Hatfield was tried at the assizes in Carlisle on several fraud charges, including one of defrauding the Post Office—he’d been franking his own letters without authority, which was a capital offence in those days—but the jury might have been fairly lenient if all his personal letters hadn’t been produced in court, especially the tear-stained letters from his many conquests, left despairing in his wake. The whole nation was on the side of poor Mary of Buttermere, including William, who later used her story in The Prelude: ‘Unfaithful to a virtuous wife, / Deserted and deceived, the spoiler came … / And wooed the artless daughter of the hills, / And wedded her, in cruel mockery.’

  Coleridge also subsequently wrote about her. What struck him particularly was that Hatfield had had the taste and talent deliberately to seek out the most picturesque places and pleasures of the Lake District, despite ‘the litany of anguish sounding in his ears from despairing women.’

  It happened to be the final day of Hatfield’s trial when the three of them arrived in their jaunting car in Carlisle, and naturally they went to see. Coleridge rather disgraced himself by shouting in court: ‘I alarmed the Judges, Counsellors, Tipstaves, Jurymen, Witnesses and Spectators by hallooing to Wordsworth who was in a window on the other side of the Hall—Dinner!…’

  ‘This day Hatfield was condemned,’ wrote Dorothy in a travel notebook she had started, just for the Scottish tour. ‘I stood at the door of the gaoler’s house where he was; Wm entered the house and C saw him. I fell into conversation with a debtor who told me, in a dry way, that “he was far over-learned”; and another man observed to Wm that we might learn from Hatfield’s fate “not to meddle with pen and ink” ’.

  The saga later appeared in several forms on the London stage and a great deal was written about it. Mary went back to Buttermere and turned out not to be so artless as Wordsworth made her appear in The Prelude, becoming a great tourist attraction and bringing in shoals of well-known visitors, including Southey. Meanwhile, leaving Hatfield to his execution, William, Dorothy and Coleridge got into their jaunting car and headed for the Scottish border.

  It’s interesting to compare the two accounts of their trip: Dorothy, writing away in her notebook of the journey about the people they met and their conversations; Coleridge, in his notebook, concentrating more on the scenery, making little drawings of buildings and slopes of hills, bringing in chunks of Scottish history and assorted philosophical thoughts. William, on the other hand, kept no diary or notebook.

  They did the things that most visitors to Scotland still do, stopping at Gretna Green (which they found very depressing), then visiting Burns’s house and grave in Dumfries. They hoped to see his widow, all of them being great lovers of Burns’s poetry, but she was out when they called. They then went up the Nith Valley to the River Clyde and through Glasgow; by this time they were all getting depressed, disappointed by the dreary Lowlands scenery, upset by the naked and dirty feet of the Glasgow poor and resigned to the low quality of Scottish inns. ‘We must expect many of these Inconveniences during the Tour,’ wrote Coleridge, ‘we wanting three beds for 3 persons.’

  The rains set in and Coleridge had to sit all day, soaked through and very miserable, while the old horse slowly stumbled on. The other two were equally unprotected, but William was concentrating on the driving and Dorothy was concentrating on keeping William cheerful; so Coleridge was left concentrating on his ills, feeling very much the outsider. ‘I went to sleep after dinner and reflected how little there was in this world that could compensate for the loss or diminishment of the Love of such as truly love us and what bad Calculators Vanity and Selfishness prove to be in the long run.’

  Despite these bouts of self-pity, Coleridge could still produce some nice observations, as in Glasgow, when he stood beside an asthmatic town crier—‘a ludicrous combination’—and then watched a lady at work in a barber’s shop: ‘A Woman-Shaver and a man with his lathered chin, most amorously ogling her as she had him by the Nose.…’ Matters improved when they reached Loch Lomond and the first glimpses of the Highland scenery, which delighted them greatly, though they all thought Ullswater was probably prettier than Loch Lomond. The weather didn’t improve, but their humour did. They ended up one evening, soaked through, sheltering in a very primitive hut belonging to a ferryman on Loch Lomond—a hovel, black inside with peat smoke—but instead of being even more depressed by their surroundings, they all collapsed in a fit of giggles.
‘We caroused our cups of coffee,’ wrote Coleridge, ‘laughing like children at the strange atmosphere; the smoke came in gusts and spread along the walls and above our heads in the chimney where the hens were roosting like light clouds in the sky; we laughed and laughed again, in spite of the smarting of our eyes.’ However, on the whole, Coleridge didn’t find much to laugh about on the tour.

  According to Dorothy’s account, the weather never seemed to get her down, and there’s no sign of her being at any time depressed. Her stories and observations are all sweetness and light. As for William, the tour was having a great spiritual effect on him, and from it came later some fine poems, such as ‘To a Highland Girl’ and ‘The Solitary Reaper’, as well as several not so good poems in praise of Burns. Dorothy’s notebook provides a record of William’s thoughts as well as of their experiences:

  While we were walking forward, we all stopped suddenly at the sound of a half articulated Gaelic hooting from the field close to us. It came from a little boy whom we could see on the hill between us and the lake wrapped up in a grey plaid. He was probably calling home the cattle for the night. His appearance was in the highest degree moving to the imagination: mists were on the hill-sides; darkness shutting in upon the huge avenue of mountains; torrents roaring; no house in sight to which the child might belong; his dress, cry and appearance, all different from anything we had been accustomed to: it was a text, as William has since observed to me, containing in itself the whole history of the Highlander’s life; his melancholy, his simplicity, his poverty, his superstition and above all, that visionariness which resulted from a communion with the unworldliness of nature.

  William got lost one day, so Dorothy recounts, walking up some rocks on his own, but another little boy found him and offered to guide him:

  His guide was a pretty boy and Wm was exceedingly pleased with him. He conducted Wm to the other falls and as they were going along a narrow path they came to a small cavern where Wm lost him and, looking about, saw his pretty figure in a sort of natural niche fitted for a statue, from which the boy jumped out, laughing, delighted with the success of his trick. Wm told us a great deal about him while we sate by the fire and of the pleasure of his walk, often repeating ‘I wish you had been with me.’

  They were all more than willing to look at any famous place, such as Rob Roy’s birthplace or William Wallace’s cave. ‘There is scarce a glen in Scotland,’ remarks Dorothy, ‘that has not a cave for Wallace or some other hero.’

  All three of them were most taken by two girls from a ferry house who helped them one evening. ‘The two little lasses did everything with such Sweetness and one of them, 14, with such native Elegance,’ wrote Coleridge. ‘O, she was a divine Creature.’ Dorothy was equally struck by their beauty, and also by their voices: ‘I think I never heard the English language more sweetly than from the mouth of the elder of these girls while she stood at the gate answering our inquiries, her face flushed with rain; her pronounciation was clear and distinct, without difficulty, yet slow, as if like a foreign speech.’

  They were still wandering around the bonny banks of Loch Lomond when, on 29 August, just two weeks after they’d left home, Coleridge went off on his own. A few days before he had sunk again into one of his pathetic moods: ‘Tho’ the World praise me, I have no dear Heart that loves my Verses. I never hear snatches from a beloved Voice, fitted to some sweet occasion, of natural prospect, in winds at night.…’ All the same, the details of their parting, in either diary, are sparse and no real explanation is given. ‘Here I left W and D, returned myself to Tarbet, slept there,’ wrote Coleridge, though above that note, some ten years later, when he was feeling truly bitter, he added the Latin tag utinam nonq vidissem (‘Would that I had never seen them’). Dorothy, in her notebook entry for that day, says that the rains had set in heavily again, ‘so poor C., being unwell, determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh and make his way thither, being afraid to face so much wet weather’.

  However, in letters which Coleridge sent to his wife while on the tour—an indication that they were still friends, despite his wanderings and his passion for Sarah—Coleridge had for some time been complaining about William: ‘This was the pleasantest evening I had spent since my Tour for W’s Hypochondriacal Feelings kept him silent.’

  Wordsworth’s version of the tour, which he gave years later to his nephew, was that the separation was all Coleridge’s fault: ‘Coleridge was at that time in bad spirits and somewhat too much in love with his own dejection and he departed from us, as is recorded in my sister’s journal, soon as we left Loch Lomond.’

  The separation itself seems to have been calm and amicable. There doesn’t appear to have been any row, or a particular disagreement over any one topic: just a general realization that things hadn’t gone well for Coleridge on the tour, and that he might as well leave his companions and go home on his own. Travelling as a threesome is often difficult; tensions creep in, as one member can easily feel that the other two are siding against him. William had previously travelled best with only one person: with Jones to the Alps, with Coleridge in the Lakes, with Dorothy to Calais. Their earlier attempt at travelling together, when the three of them (plus Chester) had gone to Hamburg, had also resulted in a parting.

  They divided up the money, and off Coleridge went, though he felt a little hurt, so he wrote to his wife, at the smallness of his share: ‘The worse thing was the money—they took 29 guineas and I six—all our remaining Cash.’ This division seems fair, however, as Coleridge was leaving them to return home, whereas William and Dorothy had another four weeks planned, plus the expense of the horse and jaunting car.

  Once on the open road, walking by himself, free of the cursed jaunting car, removed from William and his ever-attentive sister, with the weather clearing up and his spirits beginning to soar, Coleridge decided not to go straight to Edinburgh to take the coach home, as had been his plan. Why should he not see the rest of the Highlands after all, ‘having found myself so happy alone, such blessing is there in perfect liberty’.

  This is so typical of Coleridge. One moment he is at death’s door, taking twenty-five drops of laudanum every five hours to ease his pain, and the next he is off up the nearest fell, not returning home for days. In all his passions and pleasures, friendships and fancies, he tended to swing from one extreme to another. No wonder he could be exhausting, both as a companion and as a husband—yet at other times so stimulating and exciting.

  Coleridge continued on his one-man Scottish tour, walking four hundred miles in the next two weeks, overdoing things, as usual, wearing out his shoes, having nightmares and hysterical attacks, vomiting, getting lost, using up all his money, but most of the time enjoying himself tremendously. He nearly bumped into the Wordsworths again (they presumed that by this time he was safely home), when by chance they stayed in an inn which Coleridge had just vacated. In the end, he saw more of Scotland than they did in their jaunting car. They stuck mainly to the Trossachs, working their way slowly round the little roads and lochs in an arc to Edinburgh, while Coleridge struck much further north, reaching Fort William and Inverness, before coming down to Edinburgh just two days before the Wordsworths arrived there.

  The Wordsworths devoted the final week of their tour to the Border country, mostly in the company of Walter Scott, who conducted them on several trips round the countryside, which he knew so well and later wrote about in his poems. He couldn’t be with them all the time, as he had his legal work to do. Scott and William had never met before, but they had friends in common and were aware of each other’s works. The Wordsworths arrived at Scott’s home early one morning, armed with an introduction, while Scott and his wife were still in bed, but were invited to stay for breakfast.

  Scott wasn’t yet known as a poet—not until The Lay of the Last Minstrel appeared in 1805—and it was another ten years before he published his first novel, but his first book, a collection of Border ballads, had just appeared. He and Wordsworth, each the son of a lawyer
, born within a year of each other, though on different sides of the Border, had many interests in common, such as nature and the countryside, travelling and walking, but they had differing personalities. Scott had none of the austereness of Wordsworth and was more like Coleridge in his sudden passions and excitements. Like Coleridge, he was a great reader and knowledgeable on many subjects. He was generous and kind-hearted—one of the many reasons why he was so loved by all who knew him—and immediately went out of his way to help and guide William and Dorothy. He took them to Melrose Abbey, read his unpublished Lay of the Last Minstrel to them, and found them suitable inns.

  ‘Dined with Mr S at the inn,’ wrote Dorothy in Melrose. ‘He was now travelling to the assizes at Jedburgh, in his character of Sheriff of Selkirk, a small part of which was vouchsafed to us as his friends, though I could not persuade the woman to show me the beds or to make any promise till she was assured from the sheriff himself that he had no objection to sleep in the same room with Wm.…’

  William was worried that The Lay of the Last Minstrel, when published, would put in the shade Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, whenever that should be published, as the two poems were in similar styles. Scott had already heard parts of ‘Christabel’, from a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but Dorothy was convinced that the resemblance was a coincidence and that any imitation on Scott’s part was unconscious.

  One of the subjects they discussed was royalties and sales, as all good authors do when they get together, and William was surprised by Scott’s assertion that he could earn a lot more money from books, should he choose to do so. His profession, the law, was, by comparison, not very profitable. This was the opposite of Wordsworth’s own experience: making little or nothing from his writings, while watching people like his brother Richard do very well at the law. Scott, of course, went on to make a veritable fortune from The Lay when it was published and became the best-selling poet in the land.