Twelve
A House of My Own
Dorothy had no fears that a brother would be selfish or use her badly in the way that Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft described. Her reliance on her brothers predated her exclusive love for William; the ideal home she had carried in her head since she was fifteen was a house shared with a brother.
This is a testimony to the empathy which existed between the siblings who had been separated so long ago. Now, at twenty-three years old, Dorothy could talk of those relations with whom she had hitherto shared a home as affectionate but, ‘not positively congenial in pursuits and pleasures . . . and with separate and distinct views.’1
She longed to be free of the notables of Penrith and the evangelicals of Forncett. She wanted to be in a home where she could be herself, where she could hazard her own observations without fear of ridicule or censure. By 2nd September 1795, it seemed that this dream was at last within reach.
‘I am going now to tell you what is for your own eyes and ears alone . . . ’ she wrote dramatically. She was once more entering into a bit of thrilling plotting: the one-time Miss Pollard – recently married and translated into Mrs Marshall – must again play the part of confidante to the narrative of her life. That narrative had now taken a happy turn and, at last, Dorothy might have, ‘at least for a time a comfortable home, in a house of my own . . . ’2
It was over a year since Dorothy strode boldly through the Lake District to Windy Brow, and the intervening time had been an unsettled one. Lack of money had meant that she could not sustain an independent life with her brother. They had been forced to separate and Dorothy had travelled about the North of England, visiting friends and relations, but showing no inclination to return to what her family considered her home – Forncett rectory.
There had been a visit to the Crackenthorpes where Dorothy began to suspect that she – like the Dashwood sisters – was the victim of a selfish wife who had set her husband against his impecunious relations. Her Uncle Christopher was remarkably kind to her on this visit; she warmed to him and came to believe that all his apparent hostility was the result of his wife’s malevolence.
This, by the way, might seem slightly unreasonable since her uncle’s marriage had taken place after the time in Penrith when Dorothy had begun to dislike him. But a letter of Dorothy Cowper’s indicates that Christopher Cookson was courting Charlotte Cust as early as 1786, and the couple were spending a good deal of time together3 : so perhaps, in 1787 when Dorothy decided that she ‘absolutely disliked Uncle Kitt’, that notable lady had already begun to poison the mind of her lover against relations she feared would be a drain on family resources.
Dorothy had also visited her old Penrith friends Mary and Peggy Hutchinson, who were now keeping house for their brother on a farm at Sockburn, near Darlington. This household seems to have been a pleasant place and she enjoyed her time in a home where the usual occupations of reading, walking and sewing were supplemented by the rather less ladylike ‘playing at ball’. The happiness of the Hutchinson sisters could not help but remind her that, though orphaned like her, they had achieved the kind of home for which she longed: ‘very different indeed is their present situation from what it was formerly when we compared grievances and lamented the misfortune of losing our parents at an early age and being thrown upon the mercy of ill-natured illiberal relations.’
‘When shall I have the felicity of welcoming you my earliest friend to such a home?’ she wrote. ‘ . . . but these are airy dreams.’4
Dorothy was sensitive to other people’s joys and sorrows but there was a part of her which could never quite let go of her own preoccupations. The fortunes, or misfortunes, of others tended to remind her of her own troubles and grievances. The way in which her mind turned so readily from her friends’ concerns to herself is evident in several letters. She wrote, for example, in 1788: ‘Poor Miss Priestly! She is much to be pitied, the loss of a mother . . . but still she has a father, and while he lives, how much less pitiable is her situation than ours!’5
However, the contentment of the Hutchinsons must have contrasted painfully with her own rootless state. The wish that she herself might obtain a home like theirs had been repeated for many years, but she had no more power to make the dream come true at the age of twenty-three than she had had at fifteen. Despite her brave bid for freedom she was still as helpless as Jane Austen as she waited at Rowling for her brothers to agree on how she should be conveyed home.
It was a series of circumstances entirely beyond her control which, by the beginning of September 1795, turned Dorothy’s airy dream of a home into a real possibility. The first step had been taken back in June 1794 when Raisley Calvert, the younger of the two brothers who had lent their house at Windy Brow, became convinced of William Wordsworth’s genius. At the age of just twenty-one Raisley was dying of tuberculosis, and he determined upon leaving a legacy of £900 to William so that he might be able to pursue a career as a writer. It was an astonishing act of generosity. This young man’s devotion indicates the deep impression which William Wordsworth could make on people and the belief in his genius which he was able to inspire. It helps to make Dorothy’s own unswerving commitment to him appear less eccentric.
Dorothy announced Raisley’s death to her brother Richard in January 1795 in a sentence which does no credit to the sensitive feelings for which she was celebrated: ‘No doubt William has informed you of the death of his poor friend Raisley Calvert, and that he has made no alteration in his will by which he bequeathed to him the sum of nine hundred pounds.’6 There is no pause even for a few conventional words of regret on the ending of this young life, no praise of the lad’s character or mention of his sufferings; there is not even a new sentence begun before she rushes on to the pressing question of the legacy.
The money was of vital, life-changing importance to Dorothy. In her excited letter to Jane Marshall, she wrote: ‘[William] means to sink half of it[the legacy] upon my life, which will make me always comfortable and independent . . . ’ However, it does not seem that this arrangement was ever carried out, for, seven years later, when William married, Dorothy had no such comfortable independence and was obliged to ask her other brothers for support.
Dorothy was full of exuberant optimism. ‘Wm finds,’ she wrote, ‘that he can get 9 per cent for the money upon the best security’. But William would never achieve anything like this rate of return, and the Calvert legacy was very far from producing the financial security which Dorothy anticipated. William was not good at handling money. A considerable amount of the legacy was spent rather than invested and Wordsworth’s attempts to raise higher returns by lending to his friends were disastrous. Much of the interest was never paid and some of the capital was lost.7 But for now it seemed that things were beginning to go right for the young Wordsworths. Soon after the legacy had been secured, two other pieces of good fortune occurred.
William remained in Cumberland with Raisley Calvert until Calvert died in January 1795, but he did not enjoy this prolonged stay in the county of his birth. He wrote to his friend William Mathews, who was in London working as a journalist: ‘I begin to wish much to be in town; cataracts and mountains, are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions.’8
It is a surprising comment from the man whose name has come to be so inextricably linked with cataracts and mountains, and it hints at the transitional, unformed persona of the brother to whom Dorothy had committed her future. He had at this time published only two pieces of poetry, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, and, though his sister and some of his friends had begun to regard him as a poet, it is evident that William himself had not yet started to identify himself solely as such. ‘This is a country for poetry it is true;’ he wrote to Mathews, ‘but the muse is not to be won but by the sacrifice of time, and time I have not to spare.’
He was planning a different future. He eagerly picked up an encouraging comment from his friend Mathe
ws: ‘You say that a newspaper would be glad of me;’ he wrote, ‘do you think you could ensure me employment in that way on terms similar to your own?’ Politics and the great questions of the day interested him much more than mountains and cataracts and his political ideas bordered on the revolutionary.
‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall for ever continue . . . ’9 he wrote to Mathews in May 1794, and again, the following month: ‘Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders . . . I think must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement. Hence it follows that I am not amongst the admirers of the British constitution . . . ’10
These were dangerous views to hold in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century when the terrifying example of revolution just across the channel had prompted the government to take repressive measures and radicals were being summarily imprisoned. ‘I hope you will be cautious in writing or expressing your political opinions,’ wrote brother Richard anxiously to William in May 1794, ‘By the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Acts the Ministers have great powers’.11
The only surviving reply to this brotherly concern is not from William himself, but from Dorothy. ‘I think I can answer for William’s caution about expressing his political opinions,’ she replied within a few days. ‘He is very cautious and seems well aware of the dangers of a contrary conduct.’12
Dorothy’s intervention on this point raises two questions. To what extent did she ever share William’s radical political opinions? And what role did she play in turning him and his writing away from the political to the personal, from polemic to poetry? The letters and journals written during her twenties and early thirties, while showing compassion for what she termed ‘the lower classes’ and an interest in them as individuals, do not demonstrate that conviction of the need for social upheaval which her brother’s letters to Mathews display.
Dorothy was pro-French enough to avoid paying the tax on hair powder which the government had imposed to raise funds for war, believing that ‘every individual . . . should avail himself of every fair opportunity of declaring his disapprobation of the present destructive war . . . ’ 13 But that gesture was being made even in a Tory family like the Austens. In 1799 Jane’s brother, Charles, cropped his hair short and stopped using hair powder. His more conservative brother Edward was shocked. ‘I thought Edward would not approve of Charles being a crop, and rather wished you to conceal it from him . . . ’14 wrote Jane to Cassandra, attempting, as usual, to preserve that all-important family harmony.
Dorothy declared no actual support for the French Republic, nor did she recant the views of that ‘aristocrate’ who had felt reverence was due to King George’s rank and title. Set against this, there is her belief that sharing a home with William would be fundamentally different from living with relatives who had ‘separate and distinct views’, which suggests that her own views were not ‘separate and distinct’ from William’s.
In her forties and fifties, when William had retreated to a position of staunch conservatism, Dorothy would not hesitate to endorse his opinions in her letters. But the writing of the young Dorothy seems rather to sidestep political questions, focussing on the personal and small-scale.
Despite the expectation that women would confine themselves to the domestic sphere and leave politics to men, some women, as they matured and began to take note of the world around them, trespassed into male territory. Several contemporary women writers, such as Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Seward, engaged directly with the ideas of the French Revolution. This however was something which Dorothy Wordsworth would never choose to do, even when she was settled in a home where she was free to express herself. Instead she sought meaning, as Jane Austen did, in the world of family and local community. It was an approach which suited her taste for retirement, but she may also have felt that all the ‘big issues’ could be left to her brother’s pen.
As for Dorothy’s influence on her brother and his work: William believed that her influence was crucial. He wrote in The Prelude about this period of their lives:
‘She, in the midst of all, preserv’d me still
A Poet, made me seek beneath that name
My office upon earth, and nowhere else.’
It could, however, all have been very different.
After Calvert’s death, William went to London and renewed his acquaintance with the radical men he had met before his trip to France. He hoped that Dorothy would join him.
‘Dorothy and William Wordsworth have now a scheme of living together in London, and maintaining themselves by their Literary talents, Writing and translating,’ wrote Dorothy’s ‘aunt’, Elizabeth Rawson, in March 1795. ‘ . . . We think it a very bad wild Scheme.’15
It is unlikely that Dorothy approved wholeheartedly of the scheme herself; but her determination to do something for herself, her conviction that ‘it is painful when one is living upon the bounty of one’s friends,’ would almost certainly have carried her to London if an alternative more suited to her own taste for the countryside and a retired life had not presented itself. In the eighteenth century other women, such as Charlotte Lennox, Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith, finding that they must do something to support themselves, did earn a living of sorts in London, writing and translating.
It would have been a hard life for Dorothy. Wollstonecraft suffered almost continually from exhaustion and depression, and Smith, who wrote poetry and fiction to support herself and her children when her husband was imprisoned for debt, died destitute after her brief popularity as a novelist came to an end. But if Dorothy Wordsworth had been called upon to live by her talents, there might now exist a substantial body of published work with her name on it and, since her brother would have been taken up with politics and journalism, there might have been very little poetry attributed to William Wordsworth.
It was chance that decided it all.
Struggling – and failing – to make ends meet in London, William received two offers which seemed too good to refuse. An old Cambridge friend, Basil Montagu, was studying law and supporting himself by taking pupils. Montagu was a widower with a young son (another Basil) about two years old, for whom he had no time to make a home. It was suggested that this little boy should be entrusted to William and Dorothy’s care in return for fifty pounds a year.
At just about the same time, William was offered a house rent free – Racedown Lodge in Dorset. This offer came from two rich young men, the Pinney brothers, pupils of Montagu. The young Pinneys seem, like Raisley Calvert, to have been a little dazzled by Wordsworth’s promise of genius and were eager to help him in any way they could.
Maybe it is not surprising that two privileged young men, just entering upon adulthood, should be aware of no contradiction in admiring a supporter of liberty and equality while continuing to enjoy all the advantages that their father’s large fortune – made in the West Indies – bestowed upon them.
It is harder to understand the apparent unconcern with which William and Dorothy accepted their offer. The extremely comfortable Racedown Lodge had been financed by the slave trade, which ought to have been repugnant both to the radical William and to Dorothy who had been so outspoken in her support of Wilberforce’s Abolition Bill. Amazingly, Dorothy was able to report in her long letter of September 1795: ‘William is staying at Bristol, at present, with Mr Pinney and is very much delighted with the whole family, particularly Mr Pinney the father . . . ’
William Wordsworth was on this occasion a very bad judge of character. He was almost certainly blinded by gratitude. Even by the standards of his day, John Pinney senior was not a delightful man. He had restored the fortunes of the ailing estate he had inherited on the West Indian Island of Nevis through a judicious combination of sound business sense and hypocrisy. Active in the anti-abolition campaign, Mr Pinney helped to organise three petitions to parliament which played a major role in delaying the ending of the
slave trade until 1807. In 1765, he had produced a particularly unpleasant justification for the exploitation of one race by another: ‘surely God ordained them [i.e. the entire population of Africa] for the use and benefit of us,’ he argued, ‘otherwise His Divine Will would surely have been made manifest by some particular Sign or Token.’
Such was John Pinney’s reliance on his maker’s generous provision of other human beings to be exploited for his profit, that he felt no qualms about employing subterfuge to protect his grotesque enterprise. When Tom Wedgwood, son of the anti-slavery campaigner Josiah Wedgwood, visited the Nevis estate in 1800, Pinney ordered his manager not to allow ‘a negro to be corrected in his presence or so near for him to hear the whip.’16
This was the man with whom William Wordsworth was delighted. In fact, contrary to William and Dorothy’s belief, old Mr Pinney was not a man who willingly provided free accommodation either. His sons had omitted to mention to him that the new tenants of Racedown Lodge were to pay no rent and he was furious when he discovered the truth.
The patronage of richer men was an integral part of life for members of the pseudo-gentry, and this may be one reason why the Wordsworths expressed no doubts about accepting the offer of a home. They were prepared to build their future on this offer just as the conventionally Tory Austens accepted that Cassandra’s domestic happiness could be furthered by the brutal suppression of a slave revolt.
Dorothy’s letter to her friend is full of the advantages of the new project, but many of the advantages she listed were never to be realised. There was, she hoped, to be another child in the household – the illegitimate daughter of a cousin – and ‘with these two children and the produce of Raisley Calvert’s legacy we shall have an income of at least 170 or 180£ per annum.’
This second child never arrived at Racedown, nor did the teenage son of Mr Pinney of whom Dorothy also had great hopes in September 1795. If this boy was entrusted to William as a pupil, ‘then his income would be large, as he would have a very handsome salary. A Friend of Williams had the care of one of his brothers in his own house and had two hundred a year with him.’
Jane and Dorothy Page 15