Manchester, July 16. 1830.
....Though I am busy, I feel rather melancholy; and I am continually reminded how sad my life would be without the society and affection of those we love, and how terribly awful the dispensation of death must be to those who cannot anticipate a future reunion, and regard it as the utter extinction of all human interests and affections. I am solacing myself with Wordsworth. Do you know, I shall become a thorough convert to him. Much of his poetry is delicious, and I perfectly adore his philosophy. To me he seems the purest, the most elevated, and the most Christian of poets. I delight in his deep and tender piety, and his spirit of exquisite sympathy with whatever is lovely and grand in the breathing universe around us. (Vol. i. p. 86.)
(m) ANECDOTE OF CRABBE.
FROM ‘DIARY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT.’
Talking of Wordsworth, he [W.] told Anne a story, the object of which, as she understood it, was to show that Crabbe had no imagination. Crabbe, Sir George Beaumont, and Wordsworth were sitting together in Murray’s room in Albemarle-street. Sir George, after sealing a letter, blew out the candle which had enabled him to do so, and exchanging a look with Wordsworth, began to admire in silence the undulating thread of smoke which slowly arose from the expiring wick, when Crabbe put on the extinguisher. Anne laughed at the instance, and inquired if the taper was wax; and being answered in the negative, seemed to think that there was no call on Mr. Crabbe to sacrifice his sense of smell to their admiration of beautiful and evanescent forms. In two other men I should have said, ‘Why, it is affectations,’ with Sir Hugh Evans [‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ act i. scene 1]; but Sir George is the man in the world most void of affectation; and then he is an exquisite painter, and no doubt saw where the incident would have succeeded in painting. The error is not in you yourself receiving deep impressions from slight hints, but in supposing that precisely the same sort of impression must arise in the mind of men otherwise of kindred feeling, or that the common-place folk of the world can derive such inductions at any time or under any circumstances.
(n) LATER OPINION OF LOUD BROUGHAM.
I am just come from breakfasting with Henry Taylor to meet Wordsworth; the same party as when he had Southey — Mill, Elliot, Charles Villiers. Wordsworth may be bordering on sixty; hard-featured, brown, wrinkled, with prominent teeth and a few scattered gray hairs, but nevertheless not a disagreeable countenance; and very cheerful, merry, courteous, and talkative, much more so than I should have expected from the grave and didactic character of his writings. He held forth on poetry, painting, politics, and metaphysics, and with a great deal of eloquence; he is more conversible and with a greater flow of animal spirits than Southey. He mentioned that he never wrote down as he composed, but composed walking, riding, or in bed, and wrote down after; that Southey always composes at his desk. He talked a great deal of Brougham, whose talents and domestic virtues he greatly admires; that he was very generous and affectionate in his disposition, full of duty and attention to his mother, and had adopted and provided for a whole family of his brother’s children, and treats his wife’s children as if they were his own. He insisted upon taking them both with him to the Drawing-room the other day when he went in state as Chancellor. They remonstrated with him, but in vain.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Works
Old Rectory, Grasmere — the poet’s home from 1811 till 1813. The Wordsworth family found this a cold and damp house, where tragically the two youngest children died.
RECOLLECTIONS OF A TOUR MADE IN SCOTLAND A.D. 1803
Although the sister of a famous writer, Dorothy was an accomplished author and poet in her own right, often influencing some of Wordsworth’s most popular poems. She never intended to be a writer herself and her works only consist of a series of letters, diary entries, poems and short stories. She once wrote, “I should detest the idea of setting myself up as an author; give William the Pleasure of it!”
Dorothy never married and after William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, she continued to live with them. By the time she was 31, she regarded herself as too old for marriage. In 1829, she fell seriously ill and remained an invalid for the rest of her life. She died at the age of eighty-three in 1855, having spent many of her last years in an almost senile state.
Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803 is a travel memoir that Dorothy wrote about the six-week journey she made with her brother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, touring the Scottish Highlands in August and September of 1803. The account concerns literary pilgrimages to the places associated with Scottish figures significant to the Romantics, such as Robert Burns, Ossian, Rob Roy, William Wallace and their contemporary Sir Walter Scott. Dorothy’s descriptions and judgments of the countryside and landscapes provide a mixture of her own personal style and the popular aesthetics of the sublime at that period.
Travelling to Scotland in 1803 was not a simple or carefree journey and Dorothy experienced many caustic elements of Scottish life. The country had become depopulated in areas from emigration throughout the 18th century and the remaining rural Scots existed in a preindustrial lifestyle, at times similar to conditions in the Middle Ages. Many roads were poor and dangerous or mere cattle-paths requiring a local guide. More than once the Wordsworths were refused a room for the night after dark in the rain with several miles to the next town. However, at other times they experienced extreme kindness and hospitality from the Scots they encountered.
Dorothy wrote her journal over a 20-month period, beginning in September 1803, when returning from the tour. Her friends enjoyed reading the account a great deal and often urged her to publish the work. In 1822 Dorothy drafted a more refined version, but a willing publisher could not be found. It was not until 1874, almost 20 years after Dorothy’s death, that the journal was published for the first time. It was an instant success, selling out of multiple editions, and it is now regarded as being one of the finest literary travelogues of that period.
Dorothy Wordsworth in later years
CONTENTS
PREFACE.
FIRST WEEK.
SECOND WEEK.
THIRD WEEK.
FOURTH WEEK.
MEMORANDUM BY THE AUTHOR.
FIFTH WEEK.
SIXTH WEEK.
PREFACE.
Those who have long known the poetry of Wordsworth will be no strangers to the existence of this Journal of his sister, which is now for the first time published entire. They will have by heart those few wonderful sentences from it which here and there stand at the head of the Poet’s ‘Memorials of a Tour in Scotland in 1803.’ Especially they will remember that ‘Extract from the Journal of my Companion’ which preludes the ‘Address to Kilchurn Castle upon Loch Awe,’ and they may sometimes have asked themselves whether the prose of the sister is not as truly poetic and as memorable as her brother’s verse. If they have read the Memoirs of the Poet published by his nephew the Bishop of Lincoln, they will have found there fuller extracts from the Journal, which quite maintain the impression made by the first brief sentences. All true Wordsworthians then will welcome, I believe, the present publication. They will find in it not only new and illustrative light on those Scottish poems which they have so long known, but a faithful commentary on the character of the poet, his mode of life, and the manner of his poetry. Those who from close study of Wordsworth’s poetry know both the poet and his sister, and what they were to each other, will need nothing more than the Journal itself. If it were likely to fall only into their hands, it might be left without one word of comment or illustration. But as it may reach some who have never read Wordsworth, and others who having read do not relish him, for the information of these something more must be said. The Journal now published does not borrow all its worth from its bearing on the great poet. It has merit and value of its own, which may commend it to some who have no heart for Wordsworth’s poetry. For the writer of it was in herself no common woman, and might have secured for herself an independent reputation, had she not chosen rather that other p
art, to forget and merge herself entirely in the work and reputation of her brother.
Dorothy Wordsworth was the only sister of the poet, a year and a half younger, having been born on Christmas Day 1771. The five children who composed the family, four sons and one daughter, lost their mother in 1778, when William was eight, and Dorothy six years old. The father died five years afterwards, at the close of 1783, and the family home at Cockermouth was broken up and the children scattered. Before his father’s death, William, in his ninth year, had gone with his elder brother to school at Hawkshead, by the lake of Esthwaite, and after the father died Dorothy was brought up by a cousin on her mother’s side, Miss Threlkeld, afterwards Mrs. Rawson, who lived in Halifax. During the eight years which Wordsworth spent at school, or, at any rate, from the time of his father’s death, he and his sister seem seldom, if ever, to have met.
The first college vacation in the summer of 1788 brought him back to his old school in the vale of Esthwaite, and either this or the next of his undergraduate summers restored him to the society of his sister at Penrith. This meeting is thus described in the ‘Prelude:’ —
‘In summer, making quest for works of art,
Or scenes renowned for beauty, I explored
That streamlet whose blue current works its way
Between romantic Dovedale’s spiry rocks;
Pried into Yorkshire dales, or hidden tracts
Of my own native region, and was blest
Between these sundry wanderings with a joy
Above all joys, that seemed another morn
Risen on mid-noon; blest with the presence, Friend!
Of that sole sister, her who hath been long
Dear to thee also, thy true friend and mine,
Now, after separation desolate
Restored to me — such absence that she seemed
A gift then first bestowed.’
They then together wandered by the banks of Emont, among the woods of Lowther, and ‘climbing the Border Beacon looked wistfully towards the dim regions of Scotland.’ Then and there too Wordsworth first met that young kinswoman who was his wife to be.
During the following summers the Poet was busy with walking tours in Switzerland and North Italy, his residence in France, his absorption in the French Revolution, which kept him some years longer apart from his sister. During those years Miss Wordsworth lived much with her uncle Dr. Cookson, who was a canon of Windsor and a favourite with the Court, and there met with people of more learning and refinement, but not of greater worth, than those she had left in her northern home.
In the beginning of 1794 Wordsworth, returned from his wanderings, came to visit his sister at Halifax, his head still in a whirl with revolutionary fervours. He was wandering about among his friends with no certain dwelling-place, no fixed plan of life, his practical purposes and his opinions, political, philosophical, and religious, all alike at sea. But whatever else might remain unsettled, the bread-and-butter question, as Coleridge calls it, could not. The thought of orders, for which his friends intended him, had been abandoned; law he abominated; writing for the newspaper press seemed the only resource. In this seething state of mind he sought once more his sister’s calming society, and the two travelled together on foot from Kendal to Grasmere, from Grasmere to Keswick, ‘through the most delightful country that was ever seen.’
Towards the close of this year (1794) Wordsworth would probably have gone to London to take up the trade of a writer for the newspapers. From this however he was held back for a time by the duty of nursing his friend Raisley Calvert, who lay dying at Penrith. Early in 1795 the young man died, leaving to his friend, the young Poet, a legacy of £900. The world did not then hold Wordsworth for a poet, and had received with coldness his first attempt, ‘Descriptive Sketches and an Evening Walk,’ published two years before. But the dying youth had seen further than the world, and felt convinced that his friend, if he had leisure given him to put forth his powers, would do something which would make the world his debtor. With this view he bequeathed him the small sum above named. And seldom has such a bequest borne ampler fruit. ‘Upon the interest of the £900, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200 deducted from the principal, and £100 a legacy to my sister, and £100 more which “The Lyrical Ballads” have brought me, my sister and I have contrived to live seven years, nearly eight.’ So wrote Wordsworth in 1805 to his friend Sir George Beaumont. Thus at this juncture of the Poet’s fate, when to onlookers he must have seemed both outwardly and inwardly well-nigh bankrupt, Raisley Calvert’s bequest came to supply his material needs, and to his inward needs his sister became the best earthly minister. For his mind was ill at ease. The high hopes awakened in him by the French Revolution had been dashed, and his spirit, darkened and depressed, was on the verge of despair. He might have become such a man as he has pictured in the character of ‘The Solitary.’ But a good Providence brought his sister to his side and saved him. She discerned his real need and divined the remedy. By her cheerful society, fine tact, and vivid love for nature she turned him, depressed and bewildered, alike from the abstract speculations and the contemporary politics in which he had got immersed, and directed his thoughts towards truth of poetry, and the face of nature, and the healing that for him lay in these.
’Then it was
That the beloved sister in whose sight
Those days were passed —
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self; for though bedimmed and changed
Much, as it seemed, I was no further changed
Than as a clouded or a waning moon:
She whispered still that brightness would return,
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still
A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth.
By intercourse with her and wanderings together in delightful places of his native country, he was gradually led back
‘To those sweet counsels between head and heart
Whence genuine knowledge grew.’
The brother and sister, having thus cast in their lots together, settled at Racedown Lodge in Dorsetshire in the autumn of 1795. They had there a pleasant house, with a good garden, and around them charming walks and a delightful country looking out on the distant sea. The place was very retired, with little or no society, and the post only once a week. But of employment there was no lack. The brother now settled steadily to poetic work; the sister engaged in household duties and reading, and then when work was over, there were endless walks and wanderings. Long years afterwards Miss Wordsworth spoke of Racedown as the place she looked back to with most affection. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘the first home I had.’
The poems which Wordsworth there composed were not among his best, — ’The Borderers,’ ‘Guilt or Sorrow,’ and others. He was yet only groping to find his true subjects and his own proper manner. But there was one piece there composed which will stand comparison with any tale he ever wrote. It was ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ which, under the title of the ‘Story of Margaret,’ he afterwards incorporated in the first Book of ‘The Excursion.’ It was when they had been nearly two years at Racedown that they received a guest who was destined to exercise more influence on the self-contained Wordsworth than any other man ever did. This was S. T. Coleridge. One can imagine how he would talk, interrupted only by their mutually reading aloud their respective Tragedies, both of which are now well-nigh forgotten, and by Wordsworth reading his ‘Ruined Cottage,’ which is not forgotten. Miss Wordsworth describes S. T. C., as he then was, in words that are well known. And he describes her thus, in words less known, — ’She is a woman indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart; for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty, but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion her innocent soul out-beams so brightly, that who saw her would say, “Guilt was a thing i
mpossible with her.” Her information various, her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer.’
Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth Page 440