William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  Leigh Hunt, another of the London wits who scorned Wordsworth personally, put him amongst the three living poets who had characters of their own—the other two were Byron and Moore: ‘Wordsworth … is generally felt among his own profession to be at the head of it.’

  Hazlitt, perhaps the keenest critical mind of his day, always admitted Wordsworth’s genius, though he had attacked Wordsworth for publishing that letter defending the character of Robert Burns, and had accused Wordsworth of being pompous and full of cant, and his poetry for lacking joy: ‘It is because so few things give him pleasure that he gives pleasure to few people.’ Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth’s devoted friend, was in the audience one day when Hazlitt expressed these opinions and was absolutely furious. ‘I lost my temper and hissed…’

  But in 1818, in his Lectures on the English Poets (which were both delivered and published that year), Hazlitt described Wordsworth as ‘the most original poet now living … he has produced a deeper impression, and on a smaller circle, than any of his contemporaries’. Hazlitt still considered that Wordsworth was deficient in the mechanics of poetry, and unable to construct the perfect whole poem, but that as the leader of the Lake School of poetry, inspired by the sentiments of the French Revolution, he had been most responsible for rescuing English poetry: ‘Poetical literature had, towards the close of the last century, degenerated into the most trite, insipid and mechanical of all things in the hands of the followers of Pope. It wanted something to stir it up. The Deucalions who were to perform this feat of regeneration were the present Poet-Laureate and the two authors of Lyrical Ballads.’ This observation by Hazlitt in 1818, just twenty years after Lyrical Ballads was published, is still the accepted wisdom in literary circles today, though Poet Laureate Southey would not now receive such a kindly mention.

  Wordsworth’s next publication was his own personal break-through. The year after ‘Peter Bell’—1820—saw the appearance of his series of sonnets on the River Duddon—and this finally established his literary fame and general acceptance. At the age of fifty, he at last received almost universal acclaim for a volume of his poems. Apart from all the praise for the beautiful sonnets, the generously long reviews hit back at his detractors. Blackwood’s Magazine, published in Edinburgh, and with half an eye on its deadly local rival, quoted extensively from the sonnets, saying they would ‘suffice to make our readers loath for ever all the cant about “Lakish Ditties” and “Pond Poets” and acknowledge at once that this author is a genuine English classic’. They considered that the Duddon poems showed there had been ‘total failure of all attempts which have been made to check the fame of Wordsworth’.

  The Duddon sonnets are delightful to read—and display the joy Wordsworth had always felt in that beautiful stream, which rises near Wrynose Pass and flows south to the sea in Furness, through the prettiest valley in the whole of the Lakes. He’d gone there first as a young schoolboy at Hawkshead; that was the route of his fishing expedition, when he’d had to be carried back, tired out, on the back of the adult fisherman. He’d gone there many times since, though perhaps his nicest memory, one which had helped to inspire the poems, was of an incident which took place when he was alone on the banks of the river with Mary in 1811, returning from the seaside. ‘I have many affecting remembrances connected with this stream,’ he recalled. ‘These I forbear to mention, especially things that occurred on its banks during the later part of that visit.…’ They had been married almost ten years at that time, but it was one of the few occasions they had been alone on a journey together.

  More poems followed in 1822, particularly his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, a history in verse of the Church of England which concided with the appearance of a book by Southey on the same subject. They were delighted by the accident, hoping they would help each other; but Wordsworth’s poems didn’t sell very well, though they were kindly received by the critics—apart from the Edinburgh Review, which was on the attack, as ever, abusing his new work as prosy, feeble, obscure, egotistical, puerile and worthless (all the things, in other words, that they’d been saying for twenty years without respite), and bringing in his Stamp job for good measure, saying he was now ‘blinded by the possession of a sinecure place’.

  The strange thing about Jeffrey (later Lord Jeffrey), the editor of the Edinburgh Review and Wordsworth’s chief scourge, was that, in private, he maintained that he liked Wordsworth’s work and kept a copy of Lyrical Ballads on his desk. The magazine was of course a Whig publication, of which Brougham, the Westmorland election candidate, was cofounder, and they all genuinely hated and despised Wordsworth’s politics; but Jeffrey denied that his criticism had been inspired by politics and personalities. He just wanted to keep Wordsworth in his place, to counter the worship of his admirers and help him to rid himself of his faults and excesses. ‘I was always among Wordsworth’s admirers,’ Jeffrey told Crabb Robinson years later. ‘You had an odd way of showing it,’ replied Robinson.

  William had, at long last, found fame on his own terms. ‘Up to 1820 the name of Wordsworth was trampled underfoot,’ said De Quincey. ‘From 1820 to 1830 it was militant.’ This didn’t necessarily mean that overnight the sales had boomed and the money was flooding in, but William was suddenly doing much better. Even his new admirers knew he could never have a mass following, like Scott. His poetry was always going to be hard for light readers. He didn’t, however, immediately exploit his newly acquired reputation; perhaps, indeed, he was hardly aware of the change in the atmosphere. No volumes of new poetry were published for the next ten years, from 1822 until the early 1830s. Instead, he was busy revising and publishing new editions of his old work. The 1820s turned out to be, creatively, rather a fallow decade, as if, at fifty, he was beginning to be deserted by his muse.

  But in every other way it was an extremely active decade. After all, famous poets can be quite busy, just being famous, especially ones like Wordsworth, who enjoyed pronouncing on all subjects. With the increased income that his fame was bringing him, by helping to sell the new editions of his work, he was able to travel again and devote more time to his many family and domestic affairs, some of which were beginning to prove rather worrying.

  One of the penalties of fame—or perhaps some might call it one of the pleasures—is that people go out of their way just to gape at you. As early as 1816, there were trippers coming to the Lakes, who hoped for a sight of Mr Wordsworth, as part of their itinerary. In that year, ‘fourteen Cantabs’ were spotted, doing a reading and walking tour of the Lake District. ‘Some have been introduced,’ said Sarah Hutchinson, ‘and I suppose most of them will find means to get a sight of the Poet before the summer is past.’ It became a normal feature of Rydal Mount from then on, with little huddles of visitors arriving at the gates during the summer months. Hazlitt, in his lectures in 1818, could mention Rydal Mount in passing, and everyone in the audience would know whose house he was referring to.

  Undergraduates in debating clubs argued who was the better poet, Wordsworth or Byron, and after serious consideration of their respective merits, votes would solemnly be taken. Byron usually won in about 1816 or 1817; but after that, it was often a close-run thing. William was particularly liked in Cambridge, and when he went to stay with his brother Christopher, the Master of Trinity, he was always feted and dined and listened to with great attention. The first recorded letter simply asking for his autograph was sent in 1825—and William sent it off, with great pleasure. Letters were soon coming in from all over the world, especially from America. Little biographical memoirs of William began to appear in the magazines from 1819, usually with a portrait. A couple of people did approach him with a proposal to write a biography, but he dissuaded them. He wasn’t at all keen when a publisher—not his own—first wanted to issue an edition of his poems for school-children. A pirated edition of his collected works appeared in France in 1828, much to his annoyance. This was before the international copyright agreements. The Paris publisher produced his edition at little over a quarter the p
rice of the equivalent English edition, thereby ruining the English sales, though he did send William a special vellum-covered presentation copy. William later went on to fight a long battle to get the British copyright laws changed and extended.

  William generally refused to write for the magazines, sticking to his vow to try to live and work only as a poet, even when all the magazine editors wanted was to print his poems. ‘I have had applications, I believe from nearly every Editor but complied with none.’ However, in 1828 he gave in when a friend who was editing the Keepsake, a publication which included excerpts from all the best-known writers of the day, made him an offer he could hardly refuse, especially as he needed the money at the time for family affairs. They offered a hundred guineas for twelve pages of poems. He hadn’t written anything for a long time and during the 1820s he often observed in his letters that his poetic days were over. ‘My vein I fear is run out.… The Muses and I have parted company.’ But he managed to produce six sonnets, the only poems he produced to order, though, when the Keepsake appeared, he found they’d only used two. ‘I am properly served for having had any connection with such things.’

  He had his bust sculpted in 1820. Copies were on sale to the general public for £5; for personal friends he could order copies at £3. He arranged for many members of his family to have one of his busts, including his three nephews—sons of his brother Christopher—when they each in turn distinguished themselves with university prizes and fellowships. It was the fashion of the day to have a bust of one’s famous friends or relations, or just one’s heroes, on the mantelpiece. William himself proudly displayed the busts of two of his poetical friends, Scott and Southey. ‘Your bust is nearly twice the size of the Laureate’s,’ he wrote to Scott in January 1826. ‘On Christmas Day my daughter decked the Laureate with the appropriate wreath and stuck a sprig of Holly in your Mantle and there it is, “with its polished leaves and berries” among the other indoor decorations.’

  Famous people have of course to put up with nasty gossip in the magazines and newspapers, and tittle-tattle was soon appearing about the Wordsworth household: poking fun at all the ladies attending on him, or at his pride in his friendship with the Lowthers. The piece of gossip which hurt him most was a story written by Hazlitt in a series called ‘Table Talk’, still a popular name for a gossip column, which appeared in the London Magazine in 1821. Though Hazlitt admired William as a poet, he still kept up his personal attacks on him for praising the common people in his poetry, while ‘with one stroke of his prose pen, he disenfranchises the whole rustic population of Westmorland and Cumberland from voting at elections’.

  The story which Hazlitt passed on had come from Charles Lloyd, William’s old friend and neighbour, who had now recovered from his bout of mental illness. According to the story, William, when he first lived in the Lakes, used to snuff out one candle when there were two on the table. ‘It was a shame to indulge in such extravagance,’ he was alleged to have said, ‘while many a poor cottager has not even a rush light to see to their evening’s work.’ This incident was said to have taken place in 1802, wrote Hazlitt. ‘In 1816 (Oh! fearful lapse of time, pregnant with strange mutability) the same enthusiastic lover of economy and hater of luxury, asked his thoughtless friend to dine with him in company with a certain lord and to lend him his man servant to wait at table; and just before they were sitting down to dinner, he heard him say to the servant in a sonorous whisper—“and be sure you don’t forget to have six candles on the table!” ’

  The story highly amused the literary world, as tales had already gone round about Wordsworth’s meanness and about his relationship with the Lowthers, and here was a tale incorporating both rumours. William wasn’t mean—though he was certainly normally very frugal—but when he was entertaining ‘the quality’, the local beaux and belles could sometimes be seen enjoying themselves in his drawing-room, eating venison and pheasant which was often personally supplied by Lord Lonsdale.

  Lloyd appeared unaware of the fury Hazlitt’s candle story had caused in the Wordsworth household and long afterwards sent William a volume of his poetical essays which had just come out. When he received no acknowledgement, he wrote again, asking if perhaps William didn’t like his little volume. William wrote back in a tone of high moral disgust, reprimanding Lloyd for his ungentlemanly conduct in passing on stories, misrepresenting him through knowledge he had acquired ‘as a guest invited to my table’. The truth of the story, Mary said in one of her letters, was that, in the first instance, William had ‘walked to see the reptile [Lloyd] thro’ the darkness and the glare hurt his eyes’. And as for the second anecdote, the servant had been borrowed to restrain Lloyd himself because of his insanity, and only two extra candles had been called for, not six.

  William eventually forgave Lloyd, as he did most people who had caused him some offence. He was certainly never vindictive nor harboured grudges. John Wilson, the young admirer who had moved to the Lakes especially to be near him, then wrote some rather unpleasant things in a magazine, asked him for a reference when he was being considered for the post of Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. William kindly agreed and Wilson got the job. Wilson later had breakfast with William at Rydal Mount in August 1825, along with Sir Walter Scott and his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart. Canning, the Foreign Secretary, was also a visitor at the same time and became very friendly with William.

  One of the grandest parties they ever had to entertain at Rydal Mount was when the Wilberforces were their guests in 1818. It was twenty-eight years since Dorothy had first met William Wilberforce—at the house of her clerical uncle in Norfolk—and had been teased by her friend that perhaps Wilberforce might have his eye on her. Wilberforce was now married, with six children, and arrived with a party of nineteen, including servants. They took two houses at the bottom of the hill, beside Rydal Mount, plus five beds in different houses in the village. An advance party arrived first, with the chief servants, to supervise the quarters and inspect the arrangements Dorothy had made for them—which didn’t please Dorothy.

  First of all I had to receive 7 servants (William and Mary were at Keswick it the time) and on their arrival I was a little out of heart. Add to this the old Cook’s observation upon my answering one of her questions ‘such and such things must be sent for to Ambleside’ ‘Our men don’t like going errands, they are not used to it’ and her exclamation ‘what an inconvenient place’ when she found they could not get a drop of beer nearer than Ambleside—besides objections of the housemaid and kitchen maid to sleep upon a Matress.

  All was satisfactory when the Wilberforce family did arrive, though Dorothy was not completely convinced about Mrs Wilberforce. ‘Mrs W. looked very interesting … when the family came … for she was full of delight and talked as fast as any of the young ones, but I must say that she has never since appeared to me to such advantage. Yet I like her very well, admire her goodness and patience and meekness—but that slowness and whininess of manner tending to self righteousness, I do not like.’

  Many people, taken with Wordsworth and the local scenery, bought themselves homes nearby, just to be near him, such as Dr Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, who built himself a holiday home, with Wordsworth’s guidance, at Fox How. Arnold was a great radical, and they disagreed on education, religion and politics, but they became firm friends and both families enjoyed many social occasions together.

  Other new friends of the Wordsworths were Edward Quillinan and his family, who arrived at a cottage near Rydal in 1821. Quillinan was an Irish cavalry officer, who’d met the Wordsworths in 1820-21, when he was quartered with his regiment in Penrith, and had subsequently left the army on half-pay, to settle in the Vale of Rydal. He and his wife named their second daughter Rotha, after the river near their cottage. Quillinan had published some verses, and his wife was the daughter of Sir Egerton Brydges, a noted literary figure of the day. Quillinan had an introduction to Wordsworth, but their first meeting wasn’t very successful. He’d several t
imes been to the gate, once observing ‘Mr Wordsworth come out of his Cottage with a party of visitors among whom were some lovely young ladies’, but had lost heart and turned away. He eventually introduced himself and was shown in to the library at Rydal.

  He received me very stiffly, but asked me for the letter. I told him that I had not brought it with me but that it was an open letter of introduction, but that it spoke of me in a manner so extravagantly laudatory that I had not the face to present it. He seemed quite angry; whirled a chair about and made short and stiff remarks. I was getting indignant and thought him most disagreeable. Suddenly the door opened and a young lady, rather tall of good features perhaps, not handsome, but of most engaging innocence and ingenuousness of aspect, stood at the door. Then it was that I saw the Poet’s countenance to advantage. All the father’s heart was thrown into his eyes and voice as he encouraged her to come in.

  After that, thanks to the influence of Dora, William softened in his approach to Quillinan—and they all became firm friends, visiting each other’s houses. Dorothy, particularly, found Quillinan most engaging, a lively conversationalist and a trusted friend, and when Mrs Quillinan fell ill, Dorothy moved in with the family to nurse her. It turned out to be a fatal illness. She had had a mental breakdown and, while still recovering, accidentally burned herself and subsequently died. Dorothy was with her at the end, Quillinan being away in London at the time: Not long afterwards, Quillinan moved to London with his two young daughters, but the letters between the families were regular and very friendly, with love and kisses flowing from both sides. The Wordsworths usually stayed with him when in London.