Take the weather. “Five weeks have I been here, and not a single rainy day,” she announced to her close friend Jane Marshall right after Christmas. Yet the diary for her second week at Whitwick tells a different story: “A gloomy morning. Slight rain. . . .” “Blustering dark morning—Light Rain. . . .” “Dreary and damp. . . .” “Very slight rain before church—gloomy only. . . .” Or take the habit of vigorous walking that was still important to her. In Whitwick she headed out onto a bare, pitted terrain or followed a road busy with cartloads of coal. “It may be called a good country for walkers,” she told Jane brightly. In the letters she says little about her day-to-day activities; her diary, by contrast, tells us that much of her time went to housework. Cleaning went on constantly, for instance, because of the soot and coal dust in the area. Laundry, too, was more onerous. In the evenings she helped John with his sermons—apparently they were not very stirring—and rarely entertained visitors. But her letters say nothing of drudgery or tedium. Over and over she indicated that she had found the best possible place to be, and that was at John’s side. “I am more useful than I could be anywhere else.”
The blissful certainty that John needed her was the sun that greeted her each morning in Whitwick, no matter the weather. Dorothy’s rose-colored letters from Whitwick were not efforts to hide or disguise reality; on the contrary, they offered a picture closer to her emotional experience than the plain facts in the diary. Jotting down what she did each day reminded her of how she really lived. Then she closed the notebook and surrendered for a while to her heart, which was trying to reassemble Dove Cottage from the unpromising materials around her. But unlike the Grasmere Journal, her Whitwick diary says almost nothing about food, and the absence is noteworthy. No sacred moments over a basin of broth, no tears over a bitten apple. Only on a couple of occasions did something about a meal prompt Dorothy to jot down what they had eaten—and to do so in the diary, her outlet for truth telling.
John’s cook was a woman named Mary Dawson, who had worked for the Wordsworths back at Rydal Mount. Dorothy called her “an honest good creature, much attached to her Family,” but missing from this testimonial was any praise for Mary Dawson’s skill in the kitchen. In fact, she had worked chiefly as a maid until the Wordsworths, eager to replace a terrible Rydal Mount cook, moved Mary Dawson into the position. The family needed a talented cook just then, because Mary Wordsworth was recovering from an illness and could not be persuaded to eat. In order to tempt the invalid, Dorothy had asked Mary Dawson to prepare “all sorts of nice things”—a challenge evidently beyond her, because she, too, was soon replaced. But for John’s purposes, Mary Dawson appeared to be the perfect choice. He was living on a very small salary, and there would be no call for “nice things.” The virtue of Whitwick cuisine would be its economy. As Dorothy put it, “She will be a right frugal house-keeper.”
And so she was, which explains one of the most startling notes on food in any of Dorothy’s journals. She jotted it down on a frosty January day in Whitwick: “Dined on black puddings.”
That’s all she wrote, and it’s possible, of course, that I’m reading too much into it. Perhaps black pudding was a perfectly ordinary dinner for the Wordsworths, one that William, Mary, Dorothy, and the children had eaten happily for years; and on this particular January day Mary Dawson simply continued the tradition. But I don’t think so. Nothing about the nature of black pudding—and nothing about the Wordsworths—suggests that this was the case. I believe Dorothy found it extraordinary to dine on black pudding and that the few words she said about it said everything.
Dorothy made only two remarks about food in the Whitwick diary: this note about black pudding and an earlier note in which she mentioned Christmas dinner. Her birthday was December 25, so Christmas dinner was always doubly festive, and the family typically put her favorite dishes on the menu. This year the celebratory meal was simple but just right, and she scribbled it down: “Rabbit pie & plumb pudding.” She and William had dined constantly on savory meat pies when they were living together, and plum pudding was a holiday icon she had long relished. The Christmas menu, in other words, was a taste of her beloved past. Black pudding was the opposite: it was a taste of Whitwick.
Pretty much everything about black pudding signals that this menu originated not with Dorothy but with Mary Dawson—“our homely Westmoreland housemaid,” as Dorothy called her. It’s true that the Wordsworths ate plenty of pork in all forms, and for a time they even owned pigs. Yet black pudding never appeared anywhere else in Dorothy’s journals; it never showed up in her letters, and there’s no mention of it in the family’s recipe collections. A look at how the dish was made, and the class connotations that were packed into the casings along with the blood and oatmeal, may help to explain why.
Here’s a typical recipe, from Hannah Glasse’s authoritative kitchen bible, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, first published in 1747. Before killing your hog, she instructs, boil a peck of groats for half an hour. As soon as the hog is dead, collect two quarts of the warm blood and stir it constantly until it cools. Then stir in the groats and add salt, a mixture of cloves, mace, and nutmeg, and a few chopped herbs. The next day, clean the intestines of the hog and fill them with the blood mixture, adding an abundance of chopped fat as you go. “Fill the skins three parts full, tie the other end, and make your puddings what length you please; prick them with a pin, and put them into a kettle of boiling water. Boil them very softly an hour; then take them out, and lay them on clean straw.”
Plainly, there wasn’t much margin for error. The blood had to be fresh and warm or it would coagulate; the oats had to be fully cooked beforehand so they would be ready at the right moment; the intestines had to be scrubbed absolutely clean, and they couldn’t be overfilled or they might burst. As a vicarage cook, Mary Dawson wouldn’t have made her own black puddings; she would have purchased them, and we don’t know where. What we do know is that she was a penny-pinching housekeeper with no instinct for good food—a terrible combination of character traits for someone buying this particular product. Provenance was key. Like all sausages, a black pudding of unknown origin was suspect by definition. The cookbook author Mary Radcliffe, writing in 1823, advised her readers that they could safely eat the ones offered by respectable farmers and country gentlemen, but not the ones for sale in the butcher shops of London. These, she cautioned, were “so ill manufactured . . . as to form a food by no means very inviting.”
Cheap and ubiquitous, with a phallic shape irresistible to humorists, black puddings often appeared in the popular press as the favorite food of petty criminals, rascals, serving wenches, fools, and assorted lowlifes. “Merry Andrew,” the archetypal eighteenth-century buffoon, carried a black pudding, and “Moggy,” a dunce of a girl who couldn’t answer the simplest questions of the catechism, angrily pulled a black pudding out of her dress and smacked the parson in the face with it. But by the early nineteenth century more dignified sources were also acknowledging the lowly class standing of black pudding. The author of a Victorian-era glossary of North Country words and expressions called the dish a “savoury and piquant delicacy” but added that it was mostly seen “among the common people of the North.” At the large breakfasts set out for upper-class families, black pudding continued to make an appearance; but eventually the dish lost even its morning cachet. “Black puddings are not bad in their way, but they are not among the things we would make to set before our friends,” ruled Georgiana Hill in The Breakfast Book, published in 1865.
Why, then, did it show up that January day? Dorothy wouldn’t have enjoyed such a meal under any circumstances, for she suffered from what was probably colitis or irritable bowel syndrome and had been reporting painful attacks for years. Black pudding, heavy and notoriously indigestible, would have looked to her like intestinal agony on a plate. And she was the de facto mistress of the house; Mary Dawson would have consulted her on the dinner menu. Dorothy could have raised a
n objection. She didn’t.
Dorothy didn’t object to anything at Whitwick. She accepted all of it and simply translated her experience into the language she preferred, the language of happiness and satisfaction. She approved of frugal cooking and had done it herself, joyfully, at Dove Cottage, where her simple meals had been woven into the fabric of each day’s blessedness. When she made broth, it was for William’s breakfast; when she broiled a mutton chop, she served it to Coleridge in bed. “Wm & John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at 1/2 past 2 o’clock—cold pork in their pockets,” she wrote on the first page of the Grasmere Journal. It was she who had roasted the pork and wrapped the cold scraps for travel; that’s why she put it in the Journal. The very words bound her together with William. Now she was gazing at her dinner in John’s lonely house and seeing all she had lost. The food was foreign, it belonged nowhere, and neither did she. So she translated it. Like the gloomy weather, black pudding went into the diary undisguised; the words were plain and truthful. But the meal as she chose to taste it was sweet.
Dorothy had been in Whitwick for only a few weeks when John received news that the prospects for his future had brightened. Another opening for a curacy had turned up, this one in Moresby—a more prosperous and appealing town, located on the west coast of England not too far from Grasmere. He accepted the offer gratefully and made plans to move by summer. In this congenial new post, he would have no further need of his aunt’s companionship. Dorothy would stay with him for the rest of the winter, but the fantasy of extending her term of service indefinitely—winter after winter, central to John’s life and first in his heart—was abruptly shut down. As always, she expressed only happiness; but paradise was about to disintegrate once again. Dorothy had arrived in Whitwick in perfect health. As she assured a friend, “I can walk 15 miles as briskly as ever I did in my life.” When she left, she was an invalid.
It’s hard to know what precipitated her collapse that April, but one day, after she had nursed her nephew through a bad week of influenza, Dorothy was seized with intestinal pain and spent two long days in what William described later as “excruciating torture.” This may have been an attack of gallstones or possibly a dramatic worsening of her usual colitis. The family was terrified that she might die. An “obstruction” was removed, and afterward she was so feeble she couldn’t move or speak. Mary sped to Whitwick to take care of her, and slowly she became stronger, but that summer she had a relapse. When she finally returned to Rydal Mount in September, she found that even a two-mile walk was too much for her. Increasingly she felt exhausted and confused. Her symptoms—violent pain in her bowels, nausea and vomiting, and debilitating weakness—were not unfamiliar to her. She had recorded similar attacks from time to time in the Grasmere Journal (much to the displeasure of William Knight, the Journal’s first editor, who didn’t like the bowel references any better than he liked the food references). But after Whitwick, a pattern set in: she would collapse in agony, recuperate and gain a bit of strength, then fall back once more.
The standard treatment for pain was laudanum, a tincture made from opium mixed with wine or brandy. Dorothy had taken it regularly in the past for toothaches. Now she was relying on it for her frequent intestinal attacks, and the worse they became, the more heavily she was dosed. The drug, of course, was addictive; it also affected the brain, and by 1835 Dorothy was showing signs of mental disintegration. Gradually illness stripped her of nearly everything that made her recognizable. Once she had been sharp-minded, vigorous, and perpetually curious, always ready for a trek or a project, always eager for conversation. As her body and mind deteriorated she became trapped ever deeper in what Mary called a “child-like feebleness,” given to outbursts of rage, hilarity, babbling, and profanity. Helpless and homebound, she became the focus of constant worry and round-the-clock nursing. Yet in one way or another, using language when she had it and other means when she didn’t, she continued to tell her food story. In fact, it was all she wanted to talk about.
• • •
The third act of Dorothy’s food story takes place during the twenty-six long years of her illness, which among other gifts and heartbreaks left Dorothy with a new body. She had always been thin, even gaunt, but after the onset of her dementia she started complaining of “faintness and hollowness,” as William described it. He said she constantly craved “something to support her.” More and more, that something was food. She wanted to eat, she demanded to eat; her pleas became incessant. For the first time in her life she grew fat, then very fat: it took two people to hold her up if she decided to “walk” by pushing her feet along the floor. She told William she was happy only when she was eating.
But much as she craved food, it was a metaphor for something she craved even more desperately. No, not love—she knew she was loved; William never left her in the slightest doubt about that. One day at Dove Cottage she broke a tooth and realized she was well on the way to losing all of them. “Let that pass,” she wrote calmly in the Grasmere Journal. “I shall be beloved—I want no more.” But in the wake of her first breakdown at Whitwick, she had experienced a novel sensation. As she recuperated, she became aware that her illness had prompted an outpouring of tenderness, sympathy, and worry from numerous friends and family members. She was deeply moved to hear from so many people. For the first time in her life, she was able to bask in the warmth of simultaneous attention from just about everyone she knew. “It drew tears from my eyes to read of your affectionate anxiety concerning me,” she wrote to an old friend. “In fact it is the first time in my life . . . in which I have had a serious illness, therefore I have never before had an opportunity of knowing how much some distant Friends care about me—Friends abroad—Friends at home—all have been anxious.”
Selfless devotion to others had long been Dorothy’s vocation. She had taken care of William, she had tended to Coleridge, she had helped raise children, she had poured attention on the lonely and the needy, and whenever it seemed that she might run out of work, she managed to find more—until illness opened up another way to live, and she slipped right in. By 1835 she had discovered self-pity. That year William and Mary made a trip to London, leaving Dorothy and their daughter Dora, who was also chronically sick, in the care of the Rydal Mount servants. Dorothy was still able to write in her diary at that point, so we have an account of her reaction; apparently she had begged them not to go. “Wm & Mary left us to go to London. Both in good spirits till the last parting came—when I was overcome. My spirits much depressed. . . . More than I have done I cannot do therefore shall only state my sorrow that our Friendship is so little prized & that they can so easily part from the helpless invalids.” Never in her life had she expressed herself in those terms—“poor me, poor me” was simply not the way she responded to trouble or deprivation. But she was whining now, feeling sorry for herself as assiduously as if she had decided to make up for lost time.
“It will please Aunty if one of you will write to her,—for she often tells us nobody takes notice of her,” Mary reported to a niece, adding, “She has been very cross lately.” Dorothy complained often that she was neglected by her family; she said she was “ill-used” and needed protection, and she begged for signs of affection. The arrival of a birthday gift sent her into cries of delight: “You see, I have good friends who care for me, tho’ you do not,” she declared to a Rydal Mount servant who had been attending her faithfully. When the man of letters Henry Crabb Robinson, an old friend, was planning a Christmas visit to Rydal Mount, William wrote to tell him Dorothy was demanding a present. She fancied a box of the winter apples known as “Norfolk Beefins” and had been asking for them over and over, saying “she was sure if Mr Robinson knew how she longed for them, you would send her some.”
Responding to Dorothy’s pleas and outbursts was a tiring job, and responding to her physical needs was even worse. Dorothy’s symptoms included incontinence and bouts of violent diarrhea, as well as racking pains, chills, fev
er, and perspiration. She and her bedclothes had to be cleaned up repeatedly. She could not be left alone. Sometimes she moaned, chattered gleefully, or let out a wild shriek; when she was in a fury she struck out wildly at the women caring for her, and on occasion she horrified the family by bursting into profanity. When guests stayed overnight in the house, they had to be given rooms as far as possible from Dorothy’s lest she frighten or unnerve them. Yet there were also periods of clarity when she seemed almost her old self. “If I ask her opinion upon any point of Literature, she answers with all her former acuteness; if I read Milton, or any favourite Author, and pause, she goes on with the passage from memory,” William observed wonderingly. She was able to write a letter occasionally or sit in the garden contentedly. Then suddenly she became a spoiled child again, hurling demands. All year round she insisted on having a fire in her room, saying the warmth was the only thing that made her feel better. In summer her room was so hot nobody else could bear sitting in it, but if the fire was allowed to die down, she went into one of her rages until it was restored to full strength. The ever-sweltering bedroom drove Mary to the edge of her patience. “This is an intolerable experience,” she complained in a rare burst of open frustration. She was thinking in part about the amount of money they were spending on coal in the middle of August.
What She Ate Page 4