Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  The ladies ushered De Quincey up ‘fourteen steps’ to Wordsworth’s study, which was ‘seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet high’. A single diamond-paned window looked down towards Grasmere Lake, and one of two shallow recesses in the wall contained the poet’s books – only two or three hundred volumes, De Quincey noticed with surprise – unbound and uncared for. This served as Wordsworth’s composing room, the children’s playroom, the dining room, and the drawing room. When that dedicated Wordsworthian the Reverend Stopford Brooke, chaplain to Queen Victoria, secured the cottage for the nation at the end of the century, he imagined the poet in this same ‘low, dark room, his life from boyhood pass[ing] before him, vision after vision’ while ‘the walls opened and showed him the universe’.

  Few writers’ homes have been as mythologised by their own inhabitants as the house occupied for eight years by William and Dorothy Wordsworth. They were not the owners of the cottage, which they rented for £8 a year from a neighbour called John Benson, and nor was it their only significant home. Racedown in Dorset, where Wordsworth lived in 1797 before moving briefly to Alfoxden, represented equally important moments in his biography. It was in Racedown that he and Dorothy, separated as children, first reclaimed their lost years; where Wordsworth had courted Mary, and formed his friendship with Coleridge. It was in Alfoxden, where the Wordsworths then moved in order to be close to Coleridge, that Lyrical Ballads was conceived and born. But it was the cottage in the county of his childhood that was understood by Wordsworth to be his shrine. He and Dorothy had taken possession of the house at six o’clock in the evening on 20 December 1799 – the date and time were sacred to them both – and in ‘this sequestered nook’, Wordsworth wrote his finest poems, many of which commemorated the ‘embracing’ vale itself.

  After greeting Mrs Coleridge and her children, Wordsworth joined De Quincey and the ladies in his study. ‘And ‘what-like,’ wrote De Quincey, using a Cumbrian expression, ‘was Wordsworth?’ He had been led to expect a handsome man but Wordsworth, who at thirty-eight looked ‘rather over than under sixty’, was ‘not well-made’: his legs were thick and, while not exactly ‘deformed’, proved too short for his torso. Considering the distance they had covered – around 180,000 miles, De Quincey calculated – they made up in service for what was lacking in ornament, but it was a shame that he did not have a second pair ‘for evening dress parties’. On one occasion, walking several paces behind her brother, Dorothy exclaimed to De Quincey: ‘Is it possible? – can that be William? How very mean he looks!’ When seen from the back, Wordsworth carried ‘a sense of absolute meanness’, but he never looked worse than in motion, at which point he took on a ‘twisted’, insect-like appearance, manoeuvring himself at an angle and pushing his companions off the road. Equally unappealing was his narrow chest: hanging beneath drooping shoulders, the upper half of his body also contained an ‘effect of meanness’. Meanness would be De Quincey’s retrospective watchword for Wordsworth; he was the man least likely to help a lady with her reticule, and his marriage had astounded everyone, De Quincey learned, because he seemed incapable of romantic love. The poet’s head, however, ‘made amends for the. . . defects of figure’. The brow was heavy, the nose arched (like those ‘amongst some of the lowest of the species’) but the light from the eyes came from ‘from depths below all depths’. When Thomas Carlyle met Wordsworth, he described his head as ‘immense’, with ‘great jaws like a crocodile’s’. De Quincey, who had a horror of crocodiles, likened Wordsworth’s features to those he had seen in a portrait of Milton; but out on the hills the poet bore ‘a natural resemblance to Mrs Ratcliffe’s [sic] Schedoni and other assassins roaming through prose and verse’. (Father Schedoni is the murderer and confessor in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, a book Wordsworth read ‘but only to laugh at it’.)

  And what-like, for the Wordsworths, was De Quincey? They noted his size of course – he looked, Dorothy said, ‘insignificant’ – as well as his keenness to please and his great shyness. Their guest, said Dorothy, was ‘so very shy that. . . I wonder how he ever had the courage to address himself to my brother by letter’. De Quincey must have brought with him echoes of her other brother John, drowned at sea two years before. When William and Dorothy first moved to Dove Cottage, gentle John Wordsworth, known by his siblings as the ‘silent poet’, had been similarly anxious about calling at the house, and he too had retreated before finding the courage to knock on the door, eventually waiting for his siblings in the local inn. John played a marginal role in the group which comprised Wordsworth, Dorothy, Coleridge, and Mary and Sara Hutchinson; he lived at Dove Cottage for ten months in 1800, but Dorothy’s daily journals record only the presence of herself and William. Letters from John to Mary on the announcement of her engagement suggest that he would have married her himself had William not got there first: ‘whatever fate Befal me I shall love thee to the last and bear thy memory to the grave’, he wrote in his final letter to his future sister-in-law. His death three years later left them all hollow with pain, but there was guilt in the grief. John was a shadow presence in the ‘enchanting community’; his was the only role that was inessential. Any introspective and worshipful man could understudy John.

  The conversation during high tea that afternoon was ‘superior by much, in its tone and subject’, to any De Quincey had heard before, apart from that of Coleridge. De Quincey himself said nothing. For the rest of the evening Wordsworth talked about Tasso and at eleven o’clock De Quincey was shown into a ‘pretty bedroom, about fourteen feet by twelve’. He drifted into sleep, freed for the first time in years from the ‘vexation and self-blame, almost self-contempt’ which had dominated his life since writing to Wordsworth. He woke the next morning to the sounds of heavy rain and a tiny voice reciting the Creed: ‘Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried. . .’ The voice belonged to four-year-old Johnny Wordsworth, who had slept in a cot in the corner of the room. Sarah Coleridge and her children had also stayed the night, presumably sharing Dorothy’s bedroom next door, while the Wordsworths’ younger children, Dora, aged three, and eighteen-month Thomas, slept with their parents downstairs. The family were, as Dorothy put it, ‘crammed into our little nest edge-full’: it was impossible to see how Wordsworth could ever be alone. Dorothy made breakfast over the fire, after which she and William took their guest for a soggy walk around Grasmere Lake and Rydal Water. De Quincey could now observe how unsexual Dorothy looked out of doors, and the meanness of Wordsworth’s figure when seen from behind.

  He also took in their dynamic: William and Dorothy shared the intimacy that De Quincey had once known with his own sister. He had been six when he lost Elizabeth; Wordsworth was a year older when he and Dorothy were separated after the death of their mother, after which Dorothy was taken from the family home in Cockermouth to live with an aunt in Halifax. But, ten years later, the siblings were reunited, never to be parted again. Without Dorothy, De Quincey saw, there would be no Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s ‘ascetic harsh-sublimity’ was ‘humanised’ by Dorothy’s perfect sensibility; Dorothy’s eye for beauty ‘clothed the forest of his genius’. In order to be close to Wordsworth, De Quincey needed to win the trust of Dorothy, and Dorothy could never resist anyone who made her nephews and nieces happy. De Quincey was always good with children, and it was the Wordsworth children who opened the door to him: ‘Mr De Quincey,’ Johnny would say, ‘is my friend.’

  Much of the Wordsworths’ talk was of ‘intruders’, as they called tourists, and the developers whose buildings destroyed the views. On the other side of Grasmere Lake a Liverpudlian businessman with the Dickensian name of Crump had recently built himself a mansion. Crump, Wordsworth said, was ‘a wretched creature, wretched in name and nature’ with a ‘still more wretched wife’, and in 1806 the poet had warned a friend that ‘when you next enter the sweet paradise of Grasmere you will see staring you in the face, upon that beautiful ridge that elbows out into the vale (behind the church and to
wering far above its steeple), a temple of abomination, in which are to be enshrined Mr and Mrs Crump’. Houses like this, said Wordsworth in his Guide through the District of the Lakes, ‘rising as they do from the summit of naked hills’ were out of kilter with the ‘snugness and privacy’ of traditional Lakeland dwellings; these ‘disgusting’ and ‘discordant objects’ destroyed the prospect for everyone else. The name of the temple of abomination was Allan Bank, an eyesore even today. Wordsworth was known for his trenchant opinions on architecture; later in the century Canon Rawnsley (who, together with Octavia Hill, founded the National Trust to save the Lake District) described a conversation with a local builder who remembered the poet as having ‘his say at t’maist o’t’houses i’these parts’. Houses should blend into their surroundings rather than compete with nature for attention; particularly frustrating to Wordsworth was the glare throughout the valley of the whitewash on the stone. He and Dorothy swathed their own cottage in flowering shrubs and roses, but the gleam of the walls could, as De Quincey testified, still be seen from a distance.

  The next day, De Quincey joined the rest of the household on a trip to Ullswater, which was undertaken in the back of a farmer’s cart driven by a local girl. His mother had been transported around Bath in a sedan chair but, De Quincey conceded as he clambered into the wagon, ‘what was good enough for the Wordsworths was good enough for me’. They descended the Kirkstone Pass, as steep as a wall, at full gallop, and spent the night in a house by the shores of Ullswater. The following day De Quincey and Wordsworth walked alone to Penrith, where Wordsworth’s grandparents had once lived above their draper’s shop. De Quincey, who knew by heart every word Wordsworth had ever written, now heard from the poet’s own mouth lines from his work in progress, ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’. At Penrith the two men parted and De Quincey ‘sauntered’ the seventeen miles to Greta Hall to pay his respects to Mrs Coleridge. He arrived at seven o’clock and was greeted at the door by Southey, dark-haired and solidly handsome.

  Southey was a good foot higher than De Quincey, but his guest was quick to cut him down to size. The poet’s short jacket and breeches gave him the ‘air of a Tyrolese mountaineer’ and he lived among the mountains like a ‘city tailor’. A more ‘amiable’ man than Wordsworth, Southey was less profound or original. He was one of those who Coleridge might have called a ‘goody’ person. Southey, De Quincey noted, gave himself nine hours sleep a night, produced his poetry ‘by contract’ before breakfast, and answered his letters on the day he received them. His manner was ‘uniformly’ polite, but ‘a little too freezing’ to those ‘who were not among the corps of his ancient fireside friends’. Who were these friends? Wordsworth, who arrived the next day, was evidently not one of them. De Quincey believed that the froideur between the two was due to their differing views of poetry, but it was due more to their differing views of Coleridge. His brother-in-law, Southey believed, would be safer on board his own steady and reliable ship than floating rudderless in the Wordsworths’ current. Wordsworth stayed the night, and the next morning De Quincey listened in horror while the two radicals, sitting in Southey’s study, discussed the dissolution of the monarchy.

  Back in Grasmere, De Quincey and Dorothy took an excursion to Esthwaite Water. Returning in blinding rain, Dorothy suggested that they stop at the house of Charles Lloyd in the tiny village of Clappersgate, on the River Brathay. A relation of sorts – Charles’s sister, Priscilla, was married to William and Dorothy’s brother, Christopher – Lloyd was known to De Quincey as a poet, novelist, and satellite of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Now aged twenty-seven, Lloyd had once been Coleridge’s pupil and had lodged with his family in Bristol and Nether Stowey. In 1795, Cottle had published a volume of poems by Lloyd, Southey and Coleridge, and in 1797 he published Lloyd’s novel, Edmund Oliver, which contained a caricature of Coleridge in the figure of the eponymous hero, a lovesick opium addict. Coleridge thereafter described Lloyd as ‘unfit to be any man’s friend’; the friendship ‘fostered in the bosom of my confidence’ had been treated with ‘calumny and ingratitude’. The Wordsworths shared Coleridge’s assessment of Lloyd’s ‘perilous’ character. When Lloyd and his wife moved to Ambleside in 1800, Dorothy revealed to her friend, Jane Marshall, that ‘we are by no means glad that they are to be our neighbours because Charles Lloyd is a man who is perpetually forming new friendships, quarrelling with his old ones, and upon the whole a dangerous acquaintance’.

  But De Quincey immediately liked and sympathised with Lloyd, a fellow opium-eater who was then ‘at the zenith of the brief happiness that was granted to him on earth’. A critic of ‘gossamer subtlety’ and ‘exquisite sensibility’, neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge, De Quincey later wrote, ‘suspected the amount of power. . . latent’ in this man, and Lloyd ‘firmly believed that they despised him’. The same was of course true of De Quincey: Coleridge had his suspicions, but Wordsworth had no idea that this mild creature, so keen to please, would be capable of writing about them with such candour. Wordsworth, whose character, De Quincey noted, wore a ‘masculine or Roman hardness’, ‘ridiculed’ Lloyd for being ‘effeminate’, while Coleridge parodied Lloyd’s writing. Psychologically fragile, Lloyd later lost his mind and his family fell apart; Dorothy had taken De Quincey to what he called a ‘doomed household’, and shown him, as through a dark glass, a version of his future self.

  What about Dorothy? De Quincey was twenty-two when they met and Dorothy thirty-five, although he remembered her as twenty-eight. Their bond was immediate, and De Quincey, hammering home her absence of ‘personal charms’, protests too much about how unattractive he found her. He described Dorothy’s unconventional appeal as ‘impassioned’, ‘ardent’, ‘trembling’ and ‘inevitable’. ‘Beyond any person I have known in this world,’ De Quincey said, Dorothy was ‘the creature of impulse’, and the words De Quincey returns to like a mantra are ‘wild’ and ‘fervent’. She was ‘the very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known’; she was fervent in all she did. Dorothy was like one of the heroines later imagined by the Brontës, who owed a good deal to the depictions of the Wordsworths in De Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’. None of these rare qualities, however, are apparent in the chatty letters Dorothy wrote to De Quincey. Here we see only the warmth and kindness he craved.

  Did Dorothy hope that her new friend, whose arrival in her life delighted her so much and whose company she enjoyed more than that of any other visitor, might marry her? De Quincey’s sister, Jane, certainly teased him about the prospect of having Dorothy as a sister-in-law, anticipating, in her letters, visits to see the future ‘Mrs De Quincey’ in Grasmere. ‘I would like to know Miss Wordsworth,’ Jane wrote, ‘and see what sort of a woman you admire.’ To ‘admire’ was a term of sexual appreciation, and De Quincey ‘admired’ Dorothy. ‘All of us loved her,’ he recalled, and she had ‘several offers, amongst them one from Hazlitt; all, without a moment’s hesitation, she rejected decisively.’ Aside from her independence of spirit, Dorothy was of course the creation of her brother and for this attribute alone she ‘won the sympathy and respectful regard of every man worthy to approach her’. Dorothy, said De Quincey, was Wordsworth’s ‘gift from God’: her ‘mission’ was to love, counsel and cheer her brother, to ‘wait upon him as the tenderest and most faithful of domestics’ and to ‘ingraft, by her sexual sense of beauty, upon his masculine austerity that delicacy and those graces which else. . . it would not have had’.

  It may be that De Quincey was rejected by Dorothy but it is more likely, given her future sensitivity, that she felt rejected by him. De Quincey was clearly eligible: he was a gentleman and he had money. A marriage between the two would seem natural, and harmless enough. Dorothy’s life with her brother would continue much as before, while De Quincey’s place in the community would be confirmed.

  His visit to Grasmere lasted only one week; by mid-November he was back in Oxford for Michaelmas term. The acerbic tone De Quincey took in his ‘Lake Reminiscence
s’ does not reflect his initial experience of the Wordsworths, which was one of adulation. His excursion had exceeded all expectations, and he had achieved the near-impossible: he had won the trust of Coleridge, been welcomed into the home of Wordsworth, walked with the poet’s immortal sister, endeared himself to his eldest son, and discussed his work in progress. Many people adopt an alternative family who they feel to be more suitable than their own, and De Quincey adopted the Wordsworths. The poet could see into his heart: De Quincey had known this since the day ‘We are Seven’ was first placed in his hands. Lyrical Ballads was his steering chart, and Grasmere was his journey’s end.

  At ten o’clock on 12 November, Wordsworth and Dorothy saw De Quincey onto the night coach at Ambleside. As he rolled away, listening to the ‘half-flute, half-clarionet’ whistling of the driver, he projected himself into the future. Perhaps one day this road, this vale, these people, would be his. ‘What happy fortune were it here to live!’ Wordsworth had written in ‘Home at Grasmere’, with ‘One of thy lowly Dwellings [as] my Home’.

  Imaginary Prisons by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1761.

  De Quincey compared the endless growth and reproduction of the architecture in his dreams to Piranesi’s Carceri, described to him by Coleridge.

  8

  Home at Grasmere

  . . . to have a house