These really were ‘airy dreams’. In the end William and Dorothy found themselves struggling to live in Dorset on Montagu’s £50, which was not regularly paid, and the Calvert legacy which came to them only a little at a time and much of which was, of necessity, used to pay off pressing debts rather than invested. Yet Dorothy was realistic about the responsibilities that lay ahead of her. ‘It will be a very great charge for me I am sensible,’ she wrote, ‘but it is of a nature well suited to my inclinations. You know I am active, not averse to household employments, and fond of children . . . I shall also have a good deal of work, [sewing] to do – and I am determined to take the whole care of the children such as washing, dressing them etc upon myself.’
In fact, the domestic labour and childcare that lay ahead of Dorothy were almost indistinguishable from the duties she had escaped at Forncett rectory. But now she was to be living in a home she had (to some extent) chosen, with a man she loved. At Forncett she had felt herself to be ‘living upon the bounty of one’s friends’, but at Racedown she believed she would be an independent woman.
On 22nd September 1795 she joined William in Bristol, having travelled all the way from Halifax on the public coach – probably on her own! Four days later the pair arrived at Racedown. Here, in a grand Georgian mansion founded on slavery, Dorothy Wordsworth began her experiment in liberty.
Part Three
Thirteen
An Experiment in Liberty
Dorothy’s life at Racedown, a fashionable red-brick house with four parlours and formal gardens decorated with statues, began much as she had expected1. Housework was her first concern.
She had ‘one of the nicest girls I ever saw’ for a maid and, once a month, a woman came to help with the washing. ‘I give her ninepence for one day to wash,’ wrote Dorothy, the novelty of keeping her own house seeming to prompt detailed descriptions. ‘[O]n the next [day] we have got the clothes dried and on the third have finished ironing.’ This, she reported, was the only time that she had ‘any thing to do in the house’. But she was keeping to her resolution of doing all the sewing herself. She was busy making ‘frocks, shirts, slips etc’ for little Basil. She also had ‘a good deal of employment in repairing his clothes and putting my brothers (sic) into order.’2
She seems to have been enjoying herself. She was an adult now running her own house, with no aunt or grandmother to direct her. But her pleasure must have been marred by William’s gloom. ‘My brother handles the spade with great dexterity,’3 Dorothy wrote proudly as William toiled in the garden, but William himself took little pleasure in his new accomplishment. ‘We plant cabbages,’ he told his friend Mathews, sounding resigned but glum, ‘and if retirement . . . be as powerful in working transformations as one of Ovid’s Gods, you may perhaps suspect that into cabbages we shall be transformed.’4
He was returning to his theme of vegetation.
Dorothy’s routine of household management and childcare was just as she had expected it to be, while William had looked forward to a life of tutoring and studying – not digging. But, with the slow payment of the Calvert legacy and the non-appearance of the young Pinney with his £200-a-year price-tag, there was no choice but to make use of the large kitchen garden and be as self-sufficient as they could.
Some biographers have suggested that William Wordsworth suffered a mental breakdown after his return from France. If that was the case, this was the period of his recovery. It would certainly seem that at this time Dorothy was caring for two needy, vulnerable people: a deeply unhappy man, and a very young child traumatised by bereavement and dislocation. The way in which she responded to the double challenge is revealing.
She had probably read the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, particularly his Emile with its ideas about raising a child in a state of nature; for she described teaching Basil nothing ‘but what he learns from the evidence of his senses,’ and endeavouring to answer his questions as fully and truthfully as possible. ‘Our grand study,’ claimed Dorothy, ‘is to make him happy’. All this sounds as if it was inspired by the French philosopher. Rousseau’s ideas would have had an emotional appeal to Dorothy, who valued naturalness and spontaneity. ‘You are afraid to see [a child] spending his early years doing nothing,’ wrote Rousseau. ‘What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long.’
This attractive vision of childhood would help educationists break away from the brutal tradition of rote learning enforced by punishment, but Rousseau had not trialled his ideas before he let them loose on the world, and he knew very little about real children, for he had abandoned his own offspring to be brought up in an orphanage.
There was also a darker side to Rousseau’s teaching, which, surprisingly, Dorothy seems to have embraced. ‘To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn,’ he wrote, ‘and that which he will have the most need to know.’ He advocated an extremely hardy, bracing regime and a surprising number of parents at the end of the eighteenth century attempted to put the theory into practice. The parents of poor little Princess Sophie of Württemberg were disciples of Rousseau and they insisted the four-month-old baby be bathed in a cold fountain every morning and then left outside naked. Fortunately, Dorothy did not go quite so far in her treatment of the lonely grieving toddler who had been taken away from everyone he knew to live in an unfamiliar house with strangers, but her treatment of this child is odd and disquieting. It suggests that her brand of sensitivity could, at times, be surprisingly indifferent to the feelings and needs of others.
‘At first when he [Basil] came he was . . . perpetually disposed to cry,’ she explained to Jane Marshall – as if this was remarkable behaviour for such a young child in an unfamiliar environment.
She then proudly described the system she had devised to deal with this nuisance, even suggesting that her friend might find the example useful in raising her own new baby. ‘Upon the[se] occasions . . . ’ she said, ‘w[e] used to tell him that if he chose to cry he must go into a certain room where he cannot be heard, and stay till he chose to be quiet, because the noise was unpleasant to us.’ She reported with great satisfaction that the system had been entirely successful: ‘[A]t first his visits were very long, but he always came out again perfectly good-humoured. He found that this mode was never departed from, and when he felt the fretful disposition coming on he would say, “Aunt, I think I am going to cry” and retire till the fit was over. He has now entirely conquered the disposition.’5
It is hard to understand how Dorothy, who had suffered homesickness herself as a girl and who continued to lament her orphaned state all her life, could have been so indifferent to a lost, uprooted child; nor how she could suppose that the mere suppression of tears could genuinely help little Basil overcome his unhappiness. How could the woman who would write of her own adult weeping, ‘I could not keep the tears within me,’ use such a cruel, unperceptive phrase as ‘chose to cry’ about a little boy who was not yet three years old when he was entrusted to her care?
How could Dorothy Wordsworth – whose family and friends defined her by her ‘ready sympathy’ – resist the powerful human instinct to cuddle and comfort a weeping toddler? Dorothy’s sensibility was not an affectation, but there were situations in which, while remaining ‘tremblingly alive’ to her own afflictions, she could fail to enter into those of another. Reading her Racedown letters it is hard not to conclude that little Basil fell outside the compass of Dorothy’s sympathy. Though she dutifully reported that he was a ‘charming boy’ and expressed pleasure in watching ‘his little occupations’, she seems to have been able to maintain an emotional distance from him which contrasts sharply with the endless enthusiasm with which she would write about William’s children when they began to appear on the scene. Then her detailed accounts to her friends could rival a mother’s in doting admiration and shameless prejudice.
At Racedown, Dorothy was not playing a mother’s role. She was, primaril
y, a sister. She was establishing the priorities which would dominate the rest of her life. William must be the focus of her sympathy – but William was not happy. There is an air of petulance in his letters written at this time. He appears to have found less pleasure than Dorothy in Basil’s society. Contradicting Rousseau’s insistence on a child’s essential innocence, he fell back on more traditional ideas of sin, suspecting that there was much to fear for Basil’s morals; ‘among other things,’ he reported gloomily, ‘he lies like a little devil.’6
An instance of this deplorable moral degeneracy was that on one occasion the child fancied he saw a cow in his bedroom. Wordsworth solemnly ‘expostulated with him on the unreasonableness of the idea’,7 which suggests that he did not adhere wholeheartedly to the principles outlined in Emile, for Rousseau believed that childhood was ‘the sleep of reason’. Reasoned arguments about the likelihood of cows appearing in bedrooms should have been postponed until Basil was at least twelve. Certainly Wordsworth’s response to this mysterious cow is disappointing. One might expect a budding Romantic to enter more readily into a three-year-old’s imaginative world.
Dorothy and William were perhaps too absorbed in one another to be very conscientious, consistent or affectionate guardians of the child in their care. Basil himself later complained that they had treated him cruelly, saying that he ‘was constantly employed in the most menial occupations: and but for the pity of the poor villagers . . . he should have been starved.’8
William was frustrated by his inability to write anything that pleased him. He acknowledged that his only compositions had a tinge of unkindness: ‘I attempt to write satires!’ he told Mathews, ‘and in all satires . . . there will be found a spice of malignity.’9
Poverty and the lack of any prospect of an improvement in his fortunes would have been making him miserable; indecision and guilt over Annette would have made things worse too, for it is likely that it was clear to him now – if it had not been before – that he did not wish to marry the mother of his child. He would also have been reminded of another anxiety when, on a walk he saw, ‘the West India fleet sailing in all its glory . . . ’10 This was Sir Ralph Abercromby’s expedition – the expedition which Cassandra Austen’s fiancé had joined11 – and this glimpse of massed white sails caught from the peaceful Dorset hills may well have raised mixed feelings in William. The war between England and France, which he had once opposed as a cruel attack by a tyrannical nation on a fledgling democracy, was now taking on a very different meaning with the beginnings of Napoleon’s rise and France’s attempts to expand her power. One of the worries occupying William’s mind as he dug morosely in his garden was probably one which puzzled many of his contemporaries: how could a man be a democrat and a patriot?
William’s greatest torment was his uncertainty about what he should be doing, where his talents really lay and how he should try to make a difference in the world. ‘We are now surrounded by winter prospects without doors,’ wrote Dorothy in her first letter to Mrs Marshall from Racedown, ‘and within have only winter occupations, books, solitude and the fireside.’12 It sounds cosy, but it would take determination to remain cheerful in such an isolated situation if the beloved face on the opposite side of the hearth was haunted and troubled.
Dorothy had that determination, and William found the strength and support he desperately needed in his sister. Her love and her unswerving belief in him played a vital part in forming the man – and the poet – that he began to be from this time onward.
Wordsworth’s biographer, John Worthen, who defines his subject as a ‘peculiarly self-possessed but needy figure’,13 is convinced that ‘It was Dorothy’s presence and influence at Racedown which meant that he came back to being a poet.’14
To direct and form genius in this way would have been an exhilarating experience for a young woman and the way in which Dorothy said nothing about the process herself – her failure even to mention to her friends that William was troubled – was a part of that sacrificing of herself to William’s needs which would become more and more marked as her life progressed.
Her motives in determining that William should be a poet were probably complex. She believed firmly in his talent, but she was probably also anxious about the dangers of a more political career and knew that poetry could draw him towards a retired life in the country such as suited her own tastes. In exerting her influence in this way, she was making this beloved man her own. She was providing a kind of support which no-one else had given him – not even Annette.
William and Dorothy were now truly sharing their lives. They had, in William’s words:
‘ . . . found means
To walk abreast, though in a narrow path,
With undivided steps.’15
William was no longer the half-stranger whose adventures had been only imperfectly reported to his sister. His endeavours were all carried out within the home they shared. They were engaged upon a shared enterprise and their love could mature into solid friendship.
Dorothy was also making plans for the future. Somehow, she found time amidst the sewing and the washing and the providing of moral support to study Italian, reading Ariosto and Davila – challenging writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In her letter to Aunt Crackenthorpe from Windy Brow Dorothy had described her study of Italian as providing not only future ‘entertainment’, but also ‘advantage’, and Aunt Rawson’s letter about the London scheme indicates that as early as March 1795 Dorothy was seriously considering working as a translator. So her Italian studies may have been part of a plan to earn money for herself. Perhaps she had realised by now that William was not a very reliable bread-winner.
Fourteen
My Own Darling Child
I believe there is evidence to suggest Jane Austen was also striving for some degree of independence at this time. She was certainly developing a serious approach to her own work: an approach which could be described as professional.
According to the memorandum which Cassandra made of her sister’s writing, Jane set about writing First Impressions – the first version of Pride and Prejudice – just after she returned from the prolonged visit to Rowling in October 1796, working through the particularly cold winter that followed and completing the book in August 1797. (That is during the time that Dorothy and William spent at Racedown.) This brief note of Cassandra’s is one of the most revealing facts that survive about Jane Austen’s life: she wrote the novel in ten months and it was not a short book: the finished Pride and Prejudice is around 130,000 words and this first draft was probably longer, for Jane would talk of ‘lopping and cropping’ the text when she later came to revise it.
To write in ten months a full-length novel which would be enjoyed by everyone who read it or heard it read, required inspiration and talent, to be sure, but it also required sheer hard work. It required the author to sit down at her desk, not only when the whim took her and she had nothing more pressing to do, but regularly, for long periods. It required an input of time and effort comparable to that of a full-time job.
Brother Henry’s earliest Biographical Notice set the tone for the way in which Jane’s family would choose for her writing career to be remembered. ‘She became an authoress entirely from taste and inclination,’ he wrote. ‘Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives.’ 1
Since Henry wrote those words in 1817, reading her letters has made many people question this ladylike, dilettante picture. ‘I am never too busy to think of [Sense and Sensibility]’ she wrote in 1811, ‘I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child’2 . And ‘I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged to buy it,’ she would write of the same novel in 1813. And, after the publication of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice she wrote to her brother Frank, ‘I have now written myself into £250 – which only makes me long for more’.3
This does not sound like the refined disinterest which her family chose to portray. In t
he same way, it is worth noting, Henry’s sugary assessment of his sister’s character must surprise anyone who has read Jane’s letters. ‘Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be,’ he eulogised, ‘she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget . . . She never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression.’
This, however, was the woman who not only admitted that she had difficulty finding other people agreeable, but who could also pen the infamous line which has shocked and delighted generations of her admirers: ‘Mrs Hall of Sherbourne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright – I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’4 And ‘Only think of Mrs Holder’s being dead!’ she exclaimed in another letter. ‘Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the World she could possibly do, to make one cease to abuse her.’5
Even in her published work, she could describe a young boy killed at sea as ‘a troublesome hopeless son’ whose family had had ‘the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year.’6 The evidence contradicts the panegyric. However, Henry was not simply retailing conventional platitudes; he was representing his dead sister as she might have wished to be remembered. A prayer written by Jane Austen (which survives in a manuscript that may have been partially copied out by Henry) contains these lines: ‘Incline us oh God! to think humbly of ourselves, to be severe only in the examination of our own conduct, to consider our fellow-creatures with kindness, and to judge all they say and do with that charity which we could desire from them ourselves.’7 But conscientious people pray for help in overcoming their faults, not in celebration of their virtues.
Jane and Dorothy Page 16