William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  William and Walter Scott became good friends, and William wrote to Scott very warmly on his return, sending some poems inspired by Scott and the Borders and inviting him to the Lakes. Scott visited the Wordsworths several times over the ensuing decades, though he wasn’t at ease in William’s rather frugal accommodation, preferring the comfort of hotels or of bigger, smarter houses.

  Almost immediately after their return to the Lakes, Wordsworth went round to see Coleridge at Greta Hall—a sign that there was no real ill feeling between them. He also met Southey again, and, as he told Walter Scott in his letter of thanks for his hospitality, was much impressed by him: ‘I had the pleasure of seeing both Coleridge and Southey at Keswick last Sunday. Southey whom I never saw much of before, I liked much better than I expected; he is very pleasant in his manners, and a man of great reading.’

  Wordsworth came back glowing from his Scottish tour, and it is only in retrospect that the tensions between him and Coleridge become significant. It is also in retrospect that we note another important feature of the Scottish tour: that it was the last of its kind for the Wordsworths, the last of wandering about, roughing it, taking things as they came. William went on many other tours in the years ahead, as he always loved travelling, but they were rather different.

  The stimulus of the Scottish tour lasted William for many years, and he was continually drawing on its reserves; but he felt his visionary experiences were becoming rarer even before Scotland. Both in frequency and in quality they began to fade. As he approached thirty-five, certain changes appeared to be taking place, both in his character and in his attitude to life.

  THE SOLITARY REAPER

  Wordsworth included this poem as one of those he described as a Memorial of a Tour of Scotland, 1803. It is set in the Highlands he saw on that journey, but the image which sparked off the poem came from a sentence in a travel book he later read.

  BEHOLD her, single in the field,

  Yon solitary Highland Lass,

  Reaping and singing by herself;

  Stop here, or gently pass.

  Alone she cuts and binds the grain;

  And sings a melancholy strain;

  O listen! for the Vale profound

  Is overflowing with the sound.

  Will no one tell me what she sings?

  Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

  For old, unhappy, far off things,

  And battles long ago:

  Or is it some more humble lay,

  Familiar matters of today?

  Some natural sorrow, loss or pain,

  That has been, and may be again?

  Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang

  As if her song could have no ending;

  I saw her singing at her work,

  And o’er the sickle bending;

  I listened, motionless and still;

  And, as I mounted up the hill,

  The music in my heart I bore,

  Long after it was heard no more.

  11

  A Death in the Family

  1805

  NOT long after they were back in Dove Cottage, there was a knock on the door one evening at about midnight and there was William Hazlitt, their young artistic friend, the admirer of Coleridge, whom they’d first met in the West Country. He was exhausted and rather agitated.

  William had had several meetings and some serious disputations with Hazlitt since their first meeting at Alfoxden had resulted in ‘The Tables Turned’. Hazlitt had been in the Lakes earlier that summer, when he’d painted both William’s and Coleridge’s portraits—William had paid three guineas for his—but Hazlitt took them away with him and they haven’t survived.

  Hazlitt was exhausted because he had run and walked all the way from Keswick, and in an agitated state as a result of an incident with a local girl with whom he had attempted to have his wicked way. A mob of some two hundred local men had come out looking for him, determined to have his blood, or at least throw him in the river, but Coleridge and Southey had hidden him in Greta Hall. As the mob got angrier, they decided it wasn’t safe for him to stay in Keswick any longer, so they got him out of the house, wearing a pair of Coleridge’s walking shoes, and sent him over the mountains to Grasmere.

  Hazlitt probably didn’t tell Wordsworth the whole story, if he had any sense. He was still a young buck of twenty-five, while Wordsworth was some eight years older and now a respectable married man, his more dissolute days fast fading into the distance, and in his memory. Whatever Hazlitt told Wordsworth had the desired effect, and William took him in, sheltered him, gave him clothes and money, and eventually helped him to make his way south. Hazlitt never returned to the Lakes again, which was probably wise, and it was only much later that William heard the full details of the unsavoury incident. Hazlitt had apparently spanked the girl, so William related many years afterwards, when she had ‘refused to gratify his abominable and devilish propensities’.

  William and Hazlitt eventually grew apart, but Hazlitt already realized that Wordsworth was, morally and politically, moving along different lines. William had become a patriot, joining the local Volunteers on his return from Scotland, much to the disgust of Hazlitt, who admired Napoleon and hated people like William and Southey for turning against France, the country they had at one time publicly admired so much. Many young people, who’d been drawn to William by his revolutionary poetry, felt betrayed when he appeared to them to be changing sides. But they hadn’t suffered the moral and political agonies which William and Southey had suffered, when, step by step, they had seen their youthful republican ideals being gradually ruined and now, so they believed, perverted.

  Beethoven—born in 1770, the same year as Wordsworth—tore out the dedication to Napoleon in his Third Symphony, the ‘Eroica’, in 1804 when he heard the news that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor. (He later substituted the words ‘for the memory of a great man’.) Like Wordsworth, Beethoven had been inspired by the early ideals of the French Revolution, as were most of the artists who were later to be loosely termed Romantics, but his idealism turned to disgust with the rise of Napoleon.

  England was under serious threat of invasion, now that Napoleon was sweeping through Europe and it was expected that he would attack Britain next. Throughout the country, local squires and lords set up little groups of Volunteers of the Home Guard type, often clothing and arming them at their own expense; these men were drilled and attended camps, as they prepared to defend their homeland.

  Dorothy and Mary were half amused and half apprehensive when William decided to do this little bit for King and Country. Dorothy wrote to her friend, Mrs Clarkson:

  William has gone to volunteer his services with the greatest part of the Men of Grasmere. Alas! Alas! Mary and I have no other hope than that they will not be called upon out of these quiet far off places except in the case of the French being successful after their landing, and in that case, what matters? We may all go together. But we wanted him to wait till the Body of the people should be called. For my part I thought much of the inconvenience and fatigue of going to be exercised twice or thrice a week, however if he really enters into it heart and soul and likes it, that will do him good, and surely there never was a more determined hater of the French nor one more willing to do his utmost to destroy them if they really do come.

  It was a complete reversal. In his early letters and poems, William had expressed love for France and contempt for his own country, and also his opposition to war and fighting of any sort. Now he was writing sonnets in which he exhorted young men to arms, even if it led to bloodshed and death. Sir George Beaumont, his new landed friend, congratulated him on these fine sentiments and on his work with the Volunteers: ‘I am delighted with your patriotic lines, they are animating to a degree.’ Sir George was a Tory, a political state of mind which William appeared to be fast approaching as he became increasingly conscious of his position and his responsibilities.

  In January 1804, Coleridge left the Lakes, heading for
Malta, where he hoped the sun would improve his health. No one knew when, or even if, he would return. He’d been seriously ill all winter and this now seemed his only hope. Wordsworth loaned him £100 for his proposed voyage, and, before he left, the women of the Wordsworth household settled down to copy out all William’s unpublished manuscripts, so that Coleridge could take them with him. It was a labour of love, because they knew they would miss poor Coleridge desperately.

  William then got down to some hard work on The Prelude, or the poem of his life, as he called it, spurred on by Coleridge’s departure. He had hardly touched it during the last three or four years, when he was working on shorter poems, but, as it was written for Coleridge and addressed personally to him, he now decided to finish it while his friend was away, which he did by May 1805.

  Having his women around him was of course a great source of comfort and encouragement for William, as Coleridge always bitterly observed. They provided a secure and attentive domestic setting in which he could carry on with his work. As ever, he composed most of his lines in the open air, either striding up and down the back orchard, with Dorothy not far away, and making notes when necessary, or beside the lakes, along the fells. He recited his words aloud—as he’d done back in Hawkshead when walking with his dog, often frightening strangers and children who didn’t know his eccentric ways.

  At present he is walking [wrote Dorothy in a letter to Lady Beaumont in May 1804] and has been out of doors these two hours though it has rained heavily all the morning. In wet weather he takes out an umbrella; chuses the most sheltered spot, and there walks backwards and forwards and though the length of his walk be sometimes a quarter or half a mile, he is as fast bound within the chosen limits as if by prison walls. He generally composes his verses out of doors and while he is so engaged he seldom knows how the time slips away or hardly whether it is rain or fair.

  The second Wordsworth child, a girl, was born on 16 August 1804 and was christened Dorothy. ‘The name of Dorothy, obsolete as it is now grown, had been so devoted in my own thoughts to the first Daughter that I could not break this promise to myself,’ William wrote to the Beaumonts, ‘though the name of Mary, to my ear the most musical and truly English in sound we have, would have otherwise been most welcome to me, including as it would Lady Beaumont and its mother.’ Lady Beaumont was a godmother and sent £10 for the new baby, who was hardly ever called Dorothy, even obsoletely, but was eventually known by all as Dora.

  Once again, William and Dorothy went off on a trip after the birth of the new baby, though this time it was just the two of them and it was only a five-day local tour, down the Duddon valley. They missed poor Coleridge, forgetting his unhappiness the last time they’d all been together, and became more and more worried by the lack of letters from him. Dorothy of course was writing continually to him, keeping him up to date with all the family and local news, but they heard little from Coleridge in return.

  The Wordsworth household was growing bigger all the time, with two children and four adults (including Sarah Hutchinson, who was there for very long spells), plus the Coleridge children, who were regular all-the-year-round visitors. In the summer, they also received non-Lakes visitors: friends from the south, such as Humphry Davy, who came for a couple of nights.

  Walter Scott visited the Lakes at the same time as Davy, and all three men—William, Scott and Davy—travelled from Patterdale and climbed Helvellyn together, which must have been an interesting sight. They had to go slowly, because of Scott’s limp and his continuous stories and anecdotes. Davy got bored with all the literary talk and, when they finally reached the top, came down quickly on his own.

  William had taken Scott on a little tour of the Lakes, just as Scott had shown him the Borders, and they spent the night at a little inn at Patterdale. There wasn’t a bedroom for them, so they were offered the sitting-room to sleep in, but this was occupied till after midnight by four ladies, who seemed set to gossip all night, despite William and Scott shouting out the time every half-hour through the window, pretending to be London nightwatchmen.

  Scott also took Southey on his Lakes tour, and became a close friend of his, but he found Wordsworth the more impressive. ‘Wordsworth in particular is such a character as only exists in romance,’ wrote Scott to a friend after his visit, ‘virtuous, simple and unaffectedly restricting every want and wish to the bounds of a very narrow income in order to enjoy the literary and poetical leisure which his happiness consists in.’

  Dove Cottage had become too small for so many visitors, but the Wordsworths were uncertain about whether to move. They had decided to fit in with Coleridge’s plans, if only Coleridge would write and tell them what his plans were. ‘His returning to live in the North of England is quite out of the question,’ Dorothy wrote to Lady Beaumont in October 1804. ‘Therefore we intend to keep ourselves unfettered here, ready to move to any place where he may chuse to settle with his family. We find ourselves sadly crowded in this small Cottage since the Birth of the Little Girl and we are looking about for another house but we should only take it from year to year, that we may have nothing to bind us down.’ Later, in a letter to Mrs Clarkson, she was contemplating a move to Kent: ‘It is a dry county—perhaps we might all settle there. But oh, it will be a hard thing when we leave these dear Mountains without having some home to draw us back from time to time.’

  Over at Greta Hall, the Southeys and Coleridges got themselves into a mild state of panic when the owner, Mr Jackson, announced that he was selling the house. A gentleman called Mr White inspected the building with his wife and a boy servant—a boy who later turned out to be a girl dressed in boy’s clothes, to disguise the fact that she was the man’s mistress. (Keswick seems to have been the place for scandals.) But the deal fell through, and Southey and his many relations were able to stay in Greta Hall.

  William’s own income must have been in a slightly healthier position than before, judging by a call the taxman made on him in December 1804. ‘I have just had the Tax Gatherer with me,’ he wrote to his brother Richard. ‘We should have less contributions to pay if Dorothy and I had the money which I suppose you pay for in the funds or elswhere parcelled out between us. I am anxious that this should be done against the next assessment.’ It is not clear what sort of financial arrangement he was hoping to achieve, but it is the mark of the middle class, and of established man in modern times everywhere, to be making plans to take any tax advantages that were on offer.

  That winter, the lakes were frozen over once again, and this time, William, the family man, was out and about on his skates with his family in tow, or at least in front of him. ‘We had been taking our pleasures upon the ice,’ so Dorothy wrote to Lady Beaumont, ‘my sister and I sitting upon our chairs with the children on our knees while my Brother and Mr H [Mary’s brother George] in their skates drove us along.’ It must have made a very attractive family picture. Such a pity photography hadn’t been invented.

  The happy family circle was missing two people they longed desperately to have with them again in the Lakes—poor Coleridge and dear John, William’s sailor brother, whom Mary loved just as much as her own brothers. John had had two long voyages as Captain of the Earl of Abergavenny, and in January 1805 was waiting to set sail again, this time to China. He’d lost several thousand pounds on the first voyage, by investing in a cargo that didn’t sell, but if this voyage was as successful financially as he hoped, it might be his last one, enabling him to retire and live near them.

  John wrote from Portsmouth:

  My investment is well laid in and my voyage thought by most persons the first of the season and if we are fortunate as to get safe and soon to Bengal—I mean before any other ship of the season—I have no doubt that I shall make a very good voyage of it, if not a very great one—at least this is the general opinion. I have got investments upon the best of terms, having paid ready money for great part of it, which I was enabled to do by one gentleman lending me £5,000. It amounts to about £20,000 in goods
and money.

  The passengers are all down and we are anxiously expecting to sail. We shall muster at my table 36 or 38 persons. In ship’s company we have 200 and soldiers and passengers 200 more, amounting all together to 400 people, so that I shall have sufficient employment on my hands to keep all these people in order.

  John then went on in his letter to discuss his favourite poems in the latest edition of Lyrical Ballads, and also some of the unpublished poems which he’d been sent. He was a loyal reader of his brother’s poetry, and his letters were always full of intelligent comments and criticisms. He loved all poetry and took a large stock of books with him on every voyage. ‘Remember me most affectionately to Mary and Dorothy,’ he concluded. ‘Give my little namesake and his sister a kiss from me, and believe me to be, Your affectionate brother, John Wordsworth.’

  Alas, John died only a few days after this letter was written, on 5 February 1805. The ship was caught in a gale off Portland Bill and, despite the presence of a pilot on board, she drifted on to some rocks and then sank. Captain Wordsworth was one of the three hundred crew and passengers who died a cold and icy death.

  The Earl of Abergavenny was the leading East Indiaman of its day—a large, well-known ship—and all prominent politicians were appalled by the accident. It was treated as a national catastrophe and all the newspapers were full of the story for many months.

  Nothing like the death of John ever struck Dove Cottage, either before or after. Dorothy was heartbroken, physically ill with the anguish, and so was Mary. William was forced for once to do the letter-writing, informing all friends and relations of the tragedy, while trying at the same time to comfort Dorothy and Mary and to fight back his own tears.