It sounds rather a demeaning job for a poet, to become in effect a local collector of government taxes, but William was only the latest in a long line of English poets who’d become servants of the government. Chaucer had been clerk of works to Edward III; Spenser was secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland; Milton was Latin secretary to the Council of State under Oliver Cromwell. There are worse ways to earn a living.
Naturally, the whole Wordsworth family was very pleased. They could move in and furnish their fine new house, getting the Turkey carpet instead of the Scotch, without too many worries. The financial security would give William an easier mind and, when he’d organized the new job, some clear time to devote himself properly to his poetry. The London wits, however, didn’t quite see it in the same light. They considered William had sold himself to the government and had become a Lowther lackey—a social crime for which some of them never forgave him.
In the same year that Wordsworth became Distributor of Stamps, Robert Southey became Poet Laureate—a much more distinguished position, though one that didn’t pay much money (only £90 a year, plus a butt of sack). Then, as now, there were those who ridiculed the Laureate, pointing to the great poets who had never been so ennobled; but, on the whole, it was looked upon as a high honour, despite the fact that Walter Scott, the best-selling poet of the day, had just turned it down. Scott didn’t feel up to writing the required odes on royal occasions, which often brought abuse down on the writer’s head, and, anyway, he already held two public appointments. Instead, he put in a good word for Southey, as being a very deserving poet, with no other means of income and no government job, one who would dignify the profession of poet. It was a safe and popular choice. Southey consented on condition that he would write odes only when the spirit moved him, and not when the occasion demanded, which has remained the system to this day. Southey looked upon the Laureateship as something of a literary duty. For the previous hundred years—at least since Dryden, in the late seventeenth century—the position had been held by some very undistinguished poets. The Laureate who had just died was Henry James Pye, and you don’t find him in many anthologies.
It was, in a way, an honour for the Lake Poets, as Southey was linked in popular minds with Wordsworth while, in critical minds, he had been spared most of the viciousness. At the same time, the honour was regarded as a stigma in some quarters. ‘Mr Southey and even Mr Wordsworth have both accepted offices under the Government,’ wrote Leigh Hunt, ‘of such a nature as absolutely ties up their independence.’ Wordsworth later refused another government job, again put in his way by Lord Lonsdale: that of a Customs Collector at Whitehaven. If he had accepted it he would have had to move, which by now he didn’t want to do, being settled at Rydal Mount. As Sarah Hutchinson ruefully remarked, the London newspapers were not so ready to publish his refusal of this public post as they had been to publish his acceptance of the Stamp Office appointment.
One of William’s little duties as a local Stamp official was to look up his superior, the Comptroller of Stamps, when he was in London. This particular official was a very self-important gentleman called Mr Kingston, who was looking forward to his first meeting with his well-known subordinate. In fact, he could hardly wait. He was a post-dinner guest at a dinner party, held in 1817, at which Wordsworth was a guest of the painter Benjamin Haydon, who had arranged the dinner so that young Keats and others could meet Mr Wordsworth for the first time. It was a very jolly, very distinguished literary gathering and the guests included Charles Lamb. Everyone was extremely embarrassed when the awful Kingston duly arrived—except Lamb, who, being rather tipsy, made fun of him to his face.
Lamb had already been teasing Wordsworth, calling him a ‘rascally Lake Poet’, which William had taken in good part, laughing as Lamb had gone on to abuse Voltaire and Newton (not present, but there in spirit). When Kingston arrived, Lamb turned on him, calling for a candle to examine his phrenology, and pronouncing him a ‘silly fellow’ for calling Milton a great poet.
Keats afterwards felt rather sorry for William having to put up with such a man, and refused Kingston’s invitation to his house. However, on the morning of Kingston’s dinner, Keats chanced to call on William and found him dressed up in knee-breeches and silk stockings, all ready to go off and dine with his superior. Keats’s romantic image of Wordsworth as a radical spirit diminished from that moment on.
A week later, William invited Keats for dinner, where he met Mary. He also thought he met Dorothy, according to his own accounts, but it was Sarah he met, as Dorothy had stayed at home at Rydal with the children. Keats had for long admired William’s poems, and his private letters contain many quotations from ‘Tintern Abbey’, the ‘Immortality’ ode and others, but at dinner, he found William at his pontifical worst, laying down his own rules on poetry, and running down almost everyone and everything else. The scales dropped from Keats’s eyes, as far as Wordsworth the man was concerned: ‘For the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.… I am afraid Wordsworth went rather huffed out of town—I am sorry for it. He cannot expect his fireside Divan to be infallible, he cannot expect but that every man of worth is as proud as himself.’
William didn’t feel at all huffed out of town, and he had many new and distinguished admirers to huff him up, not down. Benjamin Haydon, for example, a painter of great note and reputation in his day, who knew and had painted most of the eminent writers and statesmen, was a close friend of his. Another new friend to visit was Henry Crabb Robinson, the gentleman who had helped with the so-called reconciliation between William and Coleridge. He was a wealthy bachelor, a lawyer by profession, who had met most of the great writers of Europe, including Goethe and Schiller. He later spent many holidays with the Wordsworths and became perhaps William’s closest non-Lakeland, non-family friend.
But it was a shame that William had disappointed the new young writers such as Keats. Today, we tend to classify this new young generation of poets along with Wordsworth—like Keats, Shelley and Byron—as the Romantics. You can see all their handsome images today, headed ‘The Romantic Poets’, grouped together in one room at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The new generation had been genuinely inspired by Wordsworth and Coleridge; they had thrilled to Lyrical Ballads and realized that the old order had gone, that a new spirit was in the air. It was a spirit that was simultaneously rushing through continental Europe, as poets, writers, artists and musicians generally were overthrowing the eighteenth-century classical framework and developing a more romantic, spiritual, lyrical inspiration, based on feeling rather than on form. The Romantic movement changed the culture of the civilized world, and in the English-speaking countries, Wordsworth is looked upon as its poetic leader.
At the time, however, the new poets didn’t quite see Wordsworth in this light. They were becoming increasingly biased against him, upset by reports and gossipings of his growing reactionary attitudes, and, in the flesh, his rather pompous, didactic manner hadn’t helped. He thought he was helping them, giving young people the benefit of his collected wisdom; but that wasn’t how they saw it. William, alas, once a rebel, once a violent and opinionated young radical writer and activist, seems almost to have forgotten that he was ever young himself.
Remember how our hero, as a young blood at Cambridge in 1790, had ignored the system, refused to take honours and generally rebelled against most of the disciplines? In 1816, writing to his friend Thomas Clarkson, we find him heavily advising a young man at all costs to conform at Cambridge, and not to refuse to sit for an honour. The letter is full of weighty calls to duty and responsibility, with not a hint of tolerance or understanding, nor any reference, even as a warning, to how he himself had acted while in the same situation.
Remember that Bishop of Llandaff, the one against whom William had written his fierce, radical pamphlet in 1794? Not long after they had moved into Rydal Mount in 1813, William actually went to dine with him
at his home on the shores of Lake Windermere. The bishop was one of the gentry who lived within calling distance of Ambleside, still an absentee Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, amongst other things, who had arranged for others to do his duties for over thirty years.
Remember William’s own peccadilloes as a young man in France? These didn’t stop him getting on his high horse whenever anyone else started what he thought was an inappropriate relationship, however respectably it might end. In 1814, his elder brother Richard, then aged forty-six, married a girl of twenty-two. ‘He has done a foolish thing in marrying one so young; not to speak of the disgrace of forming such a connection with a servant, and that, one of his own,’ wrote William to their other brother Christopher, the cleric.
William had never been particularly close to Richard, who had sometimes annoyed them by his slowness in answering their endless letters and queries about their finances, and had rather hurt them by only once coming to visit them in the Lakes, despite endless invitations and despite having his own property near Penrith. But, as he was their brother, they felt personally slighted by his unseemly marriage.
Dorothy proved more forgiving. A year later, when she’d at last met the girl, she was pleased to find she wasn’t such a disgrace as they feared. ‘You will be glad to hear that I like my Brother R’s wife very well—the circumstances of her education, her rank in Society, her youth, etc, being got over. She is a very respectable woman and kind and attentive to her husband. She is not vulgar, though she has nothing of the natural gentlewoman about her. Her face is very comely and her countenance excellent.’
When young Thomas De Quincey, their devoted young friend and neighbour, committed what they considered an even more shameful act, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to forgive him, though their row with him had a more basic cause than merely an unsuitable liaison.
Firstly, there appears to have been disagreement over changes De Quincey started making at Dove Cottage, such as cutting down some hedges to give more light to the apple-trees, which upset Dorothy. He was excellent with the children, and loved them all, but the Wordsworths began to be rather critical when he didn’t always do what he said he would do. ‘John now goes to Mr de Quincey for a nominal hour every day to learn Latin,’ wrote Dorothy in 1813, when John, their eldest, was ten. ‘This said nominal hour now generally is included in the space of twenty minutes; either the scholar learns with such uncommon rapidity that more time is unnecessary, or the Master tires.’
De Quincey, when in London, often took on the job of seeing some work by Wordsworth through the press, which was a thankless task, as William was always making corrections. One book went on for months, mainly because of William’s changes, but they all blamed De Quincey each time things went wrong at the printers and he got little thanks in the end for all his pains.
Dorothy had begun to take quite a delight in passing on gossip about him, once relaying to a friend that his housekeeper was thinking of leaving him: ‘What a prize she would be to your brother as a housekeeper. She is tired of Mr De Q’s meanness and greediness.’ Dorothy had been the one who’d absolutely adored De Quincey, whereas William, though liking him, had been more restrained and had kept his distance. When ill feeling arose, William tended to ignore it, not stooping to malicious remarks. ‘Mr De Quincey has taken a fit of solitude,’ he wrote in 1816, giving nothing away. ‘I have scarcely seen him since Mr Wilson left us.’
What had happened in 1816 was that De Quincey had taken up with a servant girl, Margaret Simpson, the daughter of a small farmer at Nab Cottage, just half a mile from Rydal Mount.
She had a child by him, much to the disgust of the Wordsworth household. He married her the following year, and she made him a perfectly respectable and loving wife, but the ladies of the Wordsworth household refused to call on the pair. Crabb Robinson visited both households in late 1816 and found that De Quincey had broken with the Wordsworths, which he thought was rather sad, though he tried not to take sides, managing to remain friendly with both of them.
There was also the matter of opium. They’d had enough of that with Coleridge, and when they discovered that De Quincey was becoming addicted, they now began to discourage his visits, not wishing to be involved.
The specific cause of the break in 1816 was De Quincey’s relationship with the servant girl, but perhaps the real reason for it was that the friendship had been built on a dangerous premise in the first place. De Quincey had arrived into their lives as an admirer, a slavish follower of Wordsworth, and they expected him to remain so, devoting himself completely to the Wordsworth cause but expecting very little in return. Coleridge had always been an equal, whatever else he became, but De Quincey had been consigned from the very beginning to play a secondary role—though, alas for him, he didn’t realize this for many years.
De Quincey’s Recollections of the Lake Poets, written many years later, shows how often, even in the early days, he had been hurt by little things. He was out walking with William and Southey one day when Southey asked William a question about Charles Lloyd, their friend and neighbour, who was ill. De Quincey didn’t quite catch William’s reply and asked him to repeat it. ‘To my surprise, he replied that in fact what he had said was a matter of some delicacy and not quite proper to be communicated except to near friends of the family. This to me—ye gods!—to me, who knew by many a hundred conversations how disagreeable Wordsworth was to both Charles Lloyd and his wife. The arrogance of Wordsworth was well illustrated in this case of the Lloyds.’
De Quincey was a great book-man and in the early days was perfectly willing to let William or anyone else borrow his books. At one time, he reckoned that between them, Coleridge and William had borrowed five hundred of his books and had taken them to Allan Bank. But he soon grew to resent William borrowing his books. Unlike Southey, De Quincey said, William didn’t know how to care for books; his own wretched collection, no more than two or three hundred, were ‘ill bound and in tatters’ and he hardly ever read them, unless the weather was really bad and he was stuck indoors. One day, De Quincey let him borrow a book by Edmund Burke: a virgin copy, unopened and straight from the publisher.
Wordsworth took down the volume and … unfortunately it was uncut; fortunately, and by a special Providence as to him, it seemed, tea was proceeding at the time. Dry toast required butter; butter required knives and knives then lay on the table; but sad it was for the virgin purity of Mr Burke’s as yet unsunned pages that every knife bore upon its blade testimonies of the service it had rendered. Did that stop Mr Wordsworth? Not at all. He tore his way into the heart of the volume with this knife that left its greasy honours behind it upon every page; and are they not there to this day?
Most of De Quincey’s stories are very amusing, though probably not necessarily always quite accurate, and his physical descriptions of William, especially (as we have seen) his legs, have a vividness and immediacy which the more reverential and probably more truthful accounts sadly lack.
De Quincey always numbered William amongst the luckiest people he had ever met—lucky in his love of simple pleasures, lucky in his health, lucky in his windfalls, like the Calvert money and Lord Lonsdale’s help with the Stamp job, and perhaps most fortunate of all, lucky in the women of his household—especially Dorothy. He never lowered his estimation of William as a poet, considering that of the three Lake Poets, William was the original, the true genius, even if he preferred the others as people. Nonetheless, he had to admit that, as a person, William was still interesting. Southey might be pleasanter to meet, but he was rather boring. William, despite what De Quincey considered his arrogant ways, was worth meeting, though in the end he confessed that he, personally, had had enough of him. He couldn’t put up with the strain of keeping in with him, having to hold himself in check, always feeling himself to be in the wrong. ‘Having observed this human arrogance, I took care never to lay myself under the possibility of an insult. Systematically I avoided saying anything, however suddenly tempted into an
y expression of my feelings, upon the natural appearance whether in the sky or upon the earth. Thus I evaded one cause of quarrel. Wordsworth was not aware of the irritation and disgust which he had founded in the minds of his friends.’
De Quincey doesn’t mention his own conduct, either his drugs or his love life, as being a possible cause of the parting. But he was certainly not alone amongst the younger generation in finding the middle-aged Wordsworth difficult to put up with. John Wilson, the other young student admirer who’d arrived in the Lakes especially to be near Wordsworth, left the area at about the same time. He went to Edinburgh, where he became a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine and wrote several critical articles about Wordsworth. No row is known to have occurred between them, but Wilson’s relationship with William was much the same as De Quincey’s, with William accepting the adoration, but giving little in return.
In later years, William’s friendship with De Quincey was somewhat renewed. De Quincey didn’t finally leave the Lakes till about 1830—by which time he’d taken another local house, keeping Dove Cottage for his books—and he also moved eventually to Edinburgh. But the friendship was never again of the same intensity, after what the Wordsworths considered had been his most ungentlemanly behaviour.
It does look, despite Dorothy’s half-joking remarks, as if the Wordsworths of Rydal Mount had begun to consider themselves as rather fine folks.
ODE TO DUTY
This heavy moralizing ode, published in the 1807 collection, was an indication of the new stern Wordsworth, warning of weaknesses in himself and in his friends. It was written like a hymn and proved very popular with later Victorians.
William Wordsworth Page 28
