‘What a shock that was to our poor hearts,’ wrote William, after Dorothy at last began to regain her strength. ‘Were she to depart, the Phases of my Moon would be robbed of light to a degree that I have not the courage to think of.’ Back at Rydal, she recovered enough to walk round the house, but over the next four years came a series of relapses, confining her to bed, though her mind was still active and her thoughts were harmonious. She was fit enough in the autumn of 1834 to start her Journals again, and on 4 October there’s an interesting insertion, showing she’d never forgotten what happened between William and Mary, on that day thirty-two years ago: ‘The wedding day, and if Dora recollected it she did not tell me and we let it pass unnoticed. I have again had the resolution not to go out, beautiful as the weather was, yet so beautiful at home I could not but be pleased with walking from room to room and feeling and seeing the lovely sunshine.’
In the spring of 1835, William and Mary felt sufficiently confident of Dorothy’s condition to go to London. One of their main objects was to try to secure some sort of government job for Willy. Since he had come back from Germany, the only employment they had been able to find for him was as his father’s sub-distributor of stamps in Carlisle. William, through Lord Lowther, sought the help of Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, who was an admirer of Wordsworth’s poetry; but this came to nothing, as Peel’s government was about to fall.
When William returned to Rydal, full of gloom at the Whigs coming to power, he found the house almost like a hospital. Everyone was struck down, or about to be struck down, with influenza. Dora, Dorothy and Sarah Hutchinson were all seriously ill, and so was the cook. Naturally, they feared most for Dorothy, who had been an invalid for the last five years, and were convinced that she was about to die, a release at last from her physical misery. But it was Sarah who died. Quickly, quietly and unexpectedly, just as they were sure she was recovering, Sarah passed away on 23 June 1835. ‘She had no acute suffering whatever,’ William wrote to Southey, ‘and within a very short time of her departure … she opened her eyes in strength and with a strong and sweet voice, said “I am quite, I am perfectly comfortable.”’
Sarah Hutchinson was sixty years old and had made her home with the Wordsworths for thirty years, sharing their pleasures and their pains. She’d been a vital part of those exciting early years in Grasmere. Her name was in all their hearts, carved in their memories and carved in stone on that rock where they’d all placed their names, a rock which William still stopped and stared at when he passed, often taking a knife with him to keep the letters fresh. She’d shared the excitement of Coleridge, helping him in his creative urges, perhaps even sharing his romantic urges. Was she ever in love with him, as he was with her? We will never know.
But she had also loved John, the brother who died at sea, and, according to Coleridge, it was he who had been expected to marry her. She was equally loved by Southey and his whole household; she was a friend in time of need, called in to nurse the sick, transcribe for the literary, or just cheer up the family. Perhaps they missed her laughter as much as anything. She was the one who enjoyed best the fun of the country sales, or could jest William out of his mental gloom or pain in his side. Coleridge perhaps left the best one-word description of her. She had a quality, he once said, which he called ‘entertainingness’.
Dorothy recovered from her bout of ’flu, but that was about all. As her physical strength returned, so her mental power went. The family put it down to the shock of Sarah’s death, allied with the amounts of opium which had been prescribed to relieve her pain, and hoped that, with careful nursing, her mind would return, but it never did.
Dorothy had always been a highly emotional lady, and it would seem from many of her early letters and journal entries that at times she had not been completely stable. De Quincey, and others, always commented on her wild, staring eyes. Her struggles to control her emotions, alternately subduing them or letting them burn with fire, made strangers become distressed, even frightened. ‘At times,’ said De Quincey, ‘the self counteraction and self baffling of her feelings caused her even to stammer.’
From now until the end of her life, she lived in her own twilight world, eventually confined to a wheel-chair, taken out round the garden on days of sunshine, though she often protested, determined to sit roasting by the fire, even on the hottest days. William and Mary proved absolutely devoted nurses, despite Dorothy’s frequent outbursts of anger, shouts and screams. They did it with no sense of embarrassment, still looking on her as a normal member of the household, never for a moment considering hiding her away from public or private gaze, far less putting her in a home. Strangely enough, her few lucid spells were usually poetical. Whenever a line of poetry was quoted, she could carry on the passage, reciting whole sections by William and by other poets. She had given William ears and eyes as a boy. Now, he gave her love.
Sarah’s was the first death to occur in the family household since the two children had died all those years previously, but William’s own contemporaries, both personal friends and poets, had already begun to fall. The first old friend to go was Sir George Beaumont in 1827, aged seventy-four. ‘Nearly twenty five years have I known him intimately,’ wrote William, ‘and neither myself nor my family ever received a cold or unkind look from him.’ He had been comfortably, rather than enormously, wealthy, and his presents to William had been truly generous, such as the little estate near Skiddaw, which was meant to provide a home for William near Coleridge. He had done several paintings of William’s poems, such as ‘The Thorn’, which is still in the Wordsworth family today. The foundation of the National Gallery in 1823, for which he worked, is perhaps his best-known single achievement. He left sixteen of the best paintings from his collection to the nation, including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, Canaletto, Reynolds and Claude. In his will, he left Wordsworth a legacy of £100 a year for life.
William’s last meeting with Sir Walter Scott was in 1831, when he and Dora visited him at Abbotsford. Scott was then about to make his final trip abroad, to Italy, in the hope of improving his health, but he was already in a frail state, hardly able to write in Dora’s album. Dora took this album on most journeys with her father, collecting something from almost all his famous friends. Scott managed a few stanzas, though in signing the verses he omitted the S from his own name. ‘I should not have done anything of this kind, but for your father’s sake,’ he told Dora. ‘They are probably the last verses I shall ever write.’
William was terribly upset by Scott’s appearance. ‘How sadly changed did I find the man I had seen so healthy, gay and hopeful a few years before when he said at the inn in Patterdale, in my presence, his daughter Anne also being there, with my own wife and daughter and Mr Quillinan, “I mean to live till I am eighty, and shall write as long as I live.” ’
It had been a typical Walter Scott statement, full of cheerfulness and gaiety, but one that William knew he himself could never make. Even at the time, it struck him as tempting fate. ‘I was startled, and almost shocked at that bold saying which could scarcely be uttered by such a man, sanguine as he was, without a momentary forgetfulness of the instability of life.’ Scott died the next year, 1832, aged sixty-one, worn out by his herculean literary labours to clear his debts.
Coleridge died in 1834. Although they had taken that surprise foreign tour, with Dora, in 1828, they had not become real friends again and William never saw him during the last four years of his life. After all his wanderings and drug addiction, he’d remained for the last eighteen years of his life in reasonable stability and happiness with James Gillman, his physician, in Highgate. He’d even managed to get his play put on in the West End, and it ran for twenty nights.
Charles Lamb, another life-long literary friend, died a few months later. The next year, 1835, the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg, died, and though Wordsworth hadn’t been a particular friend of his, or an admirer of his poetry, the event inspired him to write a poem in memory of all his literary fr
iends who had so recently died. It all took place in a sudden upsurge of inspiration, the sort he hadn’t had for many years, and it produced what is generally considered as the best of his late poems.
A niece who was staying with them at Rydal Mount happened to bring in a copy of the Newcastle Journal, which contained the news of Hogg’s death. William left the room, but returned in half an hour, asking his niece to write down some lines which he had just composed—lines now known as ‘Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg’. It was similar to ‘Tintern Abbey’, written some thirty-seven years previously, in that it was produced without Wordsworth’s usual alterations and corrections. In commemorating the dead poets, such as Coleridge, Scott, Lamb, Crabbe and Hogg, it was almost as if he felt his own death was imminent.
William became active poetically again in the 1830s, after a fairly barren decade, but he produced little of note—at least, little of what the scholars consider notable. He was also busy revising and re-editing various collections of his poems, as well as putting the final, final touches to The Prelude, which he at last completed in 1839, then put away, probably in the iron chest which he used for the stamp money, with instructions that it should not be opened until after his death.
Mary, and all his family and close friends, hoped that he might get back to ‘The Recluse’, his master work, of which The Prelude was to be the first part; but he never did, contenting himself with sonnets and little verses, produced as the mood took him, and written on a multitude of likely and unlikely subjects. ‘Has Wordsworth written no sonnet on the Income Tax,’ asked a friend in 1842.
Off and on, over the previous twenty years, William had often remarked that he thought the muse had gone, but there’s no sign that he really believed it. He worked as hard as ever, whenever he felt a poem taking shape, and was as proud of the result.
Mrs Wudsworth would say ‘ring the bell’ but he wouldn’t stir [a former servant at Rydal Mount later recalled]. ‘Goa and see what he’s doing,’ she’d say, and we wad goa up to study door and hear him mumbling and bumming through it. ‘Dinner’s ready, sir,’ I’d ca’ out. He’d goa mumbling on like a deaf man, ya see. And sometimes Mrs Wudsworth ’ud say, ‘Goa and brek a bottle, or let a dish fall just outside door in passage.’ Eh dear, that maistly would bring him out, wad that. For ye kna that he was a verra careful man, and he couldn’t do with brekking t’china.
William was by now well into his late sixties, and not many great poets have been creative at that late stage. The Great Decade, as far as Wordsworth’s poetry is concerned, is usually said to have been 1796–1806, but little-known works, written in later years, are constantly being reanalysed and revalued. After the James Hogg effusion in 1835, however, there is very little that people trouble to read today.
The 1830s were altogether a fairly depressing time for William. Apart from Dorothy’s decline, and then the deaths of his friends and contemporaries, there was the state of the nation in general. He was upset by the movement for reform, which culminated in the 1832 Reform Bill, when the Whigs had at last achieved office, and prophesied that nothing but doom would result from the enlargement of the franchise. ‘I was so depressed with the aspect of public affairs,’ he wrote to his brother Christopher in 1832, ‘that were it not for our dear sister’s illness, I should think of nothing else. They are to be envied, I think who from age or infirmity, are likely to be removed from the afflictions which God is preparing for this sinful nation.’ He also prophesied economic ruin, political chaos and social disintegration. On all sides, he saw threats to the Church of England, which he stoutly defended from all attacks—either from the Dissenters or from the Roman Catholic Church. He was against Catholic Emancipation and felt the monarchy would be in danger should it ever happen: ‘These two islands are likely to reap the fruit of their own folly and madness in becoming, for the present generation, the two most unquiet and miserable spots upon the earth.’
He grieved for what he considered the depressed state of poetry and of the English language—‘the disgusting frequency with which the word artistical, imported with other impertinencies from the Germans, is employed by writers of the present day’—and for the poverty of the publishing business. He even managed to chastise the scientists of the day, condemning them for their airs and graces, and for being more concerned for titles than for caring for humanity. This could have been a dig at his old friend Sir Humphry Davy, who was now a man of high fashion.
It was a time of general social unrest, and William himself did have many personal reasons for gloom and despondency, but, throughout the 1830s, an air of melancholy seems to have pervaded even his happiest moments. One day in 1836, walking up Easedale, his favourite walk near Grasmere, on a perfect autumn day, he came with some friends upon a beautiful tumbling stream.
I have often thought what a solemn thing it would be [he said, turning to his friends] if we could have brought to our mind, at once, all the scenes of distress and misery, which any spot, however beautiful and calm before us, has been witness to since the beginning. That water break, with the glassy, quiet pool beneath it, that looks so lovely, and presents no images to the mind but of peace—there, I remember, the only son of his father, a poor man, who lived yonder, was drowned. He missed him, came to search, and saw his body dead in the pool.
In 1837, William undertook a trip to Italy with Crabb Robinson. They managed to pay a quick visit to Caroline on their way through Paris (this was the last time father and daughter ever met). The tour as a whole ended earlier than they’d planned. William found that he and Crabb Robinson, for all their years of friendship and intimacy, had different habits. William loved to be up and on his way at the crack of dawn, while Robinson was still asleep. William went to his bedroom when the sun went down, unable to read by candlelight, while Robinson was just getting ready for the town, to visit the reading rooms and parties. ‘One night I heard him in bed composing verses,’ wrote Robinson, ‘and on the following day I offered to be his amanuensis; but I was not patient enough, I fear, and he did not employ me a second time.’
William missed having any of his regular female companions with him, and vowed never to travel without one again. He was very homesick, writing home quite pathetic letters to Mary, promising never to be irritable or cross with any of them again and saying how much he loved them all.
In 1838, William learned some news which, on the face of it, should have made him extremely happy, but which drove him to the depths of misery and worry. Dora wanted to get married.
John, his eldest child, was already married, to everyone’s satisfaction and relief. Not long after he had moved to his living at Moresby, near Whitehaven, John had married Isabella Curwen, in October 1830. She was the daughter of Mr Curwen, of Workington Hall and of Belle Isle in Windermere. The Curwens were a noted Cumbrian family, well known by William since his school-days at Hawkshead. (He mentions Mr Curwen twice in his Guide to the Lakes, both times favourably, complimenting him on his plantations, little knowing that his son would one day marry into the family.)
The person Dora wanted to marry didn’t have quite such a solid or favourable background. She was in love, so she told her father, with Edward Quillinan.
Dora had been just seventeen when she first met Quillinan, and he was then a family man of thirty, married with two children, a man of the world, an army officer who had served in various parts of Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. As we have seen, he had become very much a family friend of William’s and Dorothy’s, part of their generation rather than of the youthful Dora’s. They had visited him as a family, when they stayed with him in London, but gradually, when he came to Rydal on visits, it was Dora he most wanted to see. By 1825, she was confiding to a girl friend that she liked ‘the heavy dragoon, better than any other man’.
In their family letters to Quillinan, Dorothy and William always passed on Dora’s best wishes. Even when she was sending him ‘a thousand loves’, William seems to have been completely unaware of their c
ourtship, looking upon Quillinan as one of his own dearest personal friends. Quillinan once sent them some of his poems, which Dora read to her father. William was much impressed by them, writing to tell Quillinan that, if he could correct a few faults, it was in his power ‘to attain a permanent place amongst the poets of England’. It was a terrible shock when Dora finally told her father that she and Quillinan wanted to become engaged. William’s immediate reaction was to refuse his permission.
It is easy to say that William was being possessive, that he selfishly didn’t want to lose his only daughter. She had certainly been his favourite travelling companion for the last ten years. She was so good for him—cheekier, as she said herself, than any of his other household ladies. There was a joke amongst their friends that some men were henpecked, but that Wordsworth was chicken-pecked.
Although she now travelled a lot, thanks to her father, she had spent a very sheltered girlhood. Her best friends were over in the Southey household, where there were no boys of her age. John, her elder brother, doesn’t appear to have brought any of his own male friends to the house—none, at least, that she took a fancy to. Mr Quillinan, then, although her father’s friend, must have appeared a very dashing figure, charming and amusing, experienced and worldly, but at the same time a cultivated figure, a poet like her father—or a would-be poet.
William was patently horrified when he was told what had been going on under his nose, but he denied that he was reacting selfishly. Nor was Quillinan’s age ever mentioned in all the arguments that ensued, nor even that he was a Roman Catholic. It was his lack of prospects which worried William. He had no income, apart from his army pension, and no fixed abode. He wandered around, between London and Portugal, where his family had lived, or in rented cottages in Rydal. He already had two young girls to support. How could he take on a new wife, especially one who had always been delicate, one who needed the best attention and care?
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