by Toby Litt
I found the phrase ‘ye Five-wandering Bards’ puzzling, until I discovered it was a reference to the satirical cartoonist James Gillray’s 1798 cartoon ‘NEW MORALITY’.‡‡
This fearsome image came from the Anti-Jacobin Magazine & Review, and is a manic Tory assault on all perceived sympathizers with the Revolutionaries of France – ‘The sect of MARAT, MIRABEAU, VOLTAIRE’. Some English traitors’ names are given in full, others are dashed out but would have been known by all.
‘Whether ye make the Rights of Man your theme, / Your Country libel, and your God blaspheme, / Or dirt on private worth and virtue throw.’ This was William’s politics – manly, patriotic, straightforward.
Chief among the ‘creeping creatures, venomous and low’ worthy of disdain are poets. The verse below reads: ‘And ye five other wandering Bards that move/ In sweet accord and harmony of love / C_____DGE and S__TH_Y, L___D and L__B and Co’.§§ William, in similarly rumbustious vein, cops this entire, and names the ‘Co’ to boot: Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lloyd and Lamb.:
S—the-y and C––-ge, W-rdsw-rth, Ll—d and L—b!
No more veg-musing, dine on Eggs and Ham;
I found ‘veg-musing’ very funny. And I liked the unwitting anticipation of Dr Seuss’s ‘Green Eggs and Ham’. I could see William starting to delight in the sound of his words.
Your lov’d Elysium other wanderers throng
And teize you to applaud their vapid Song.
With Rhyme-clad Oaths, haste! quit your shelt’ring Elms:
Search England’s Maps for some more Desert Realms.
Pack up your Manuscripts and fishing go—
What a wonderful line that was! How dismissive – although I knew I was one of the manuscript-makers being dismissed.
Where you may not be gaz’d at – for a Show.
This was very interesting, because the flood of tourists into the Lake District is usually dated a little later than 1812.¶¶ When William was writing, the very idea of a tour-ist was only just getting going. Wordsworth was playing his part in encouraging it, by anonymously publishing – in 1810 – A Guide through the District of the Lakes. Within a few years, with true irony, Wordsworth himself had become a stop on the tourist trail. Dove Cottage, quite unhermitagelike in its location, was on Grasmere’s main road (and within sight and sound of the wrestling ring). There are anecdotes of visitors pursuing the despairing poet up into the once solitary hills. But they were the guests his verses had invited, come to admire the beauties he had publicized.
Then quick emerge, ye Cits, from London Dust;
That’s what Bill and Roger had implied I was, with the Belted Galloways mooching in the next field. A ‘cit’, a city boy. William’s geography here, and his genealogy, was deliberately off. To address Wordsworth (born in Workington, the next big coastal town north of Whitehaven) as a city-boy was just wrong. But William is more likely having a go at Wordsworth’s Southern imitators. This distinction wouldn’t have impressed Wordsworth, and may be one of the reasons they never got on.
‘Tis hard (they cry) to live ’midst Tar and Oil,
And never in a Wood the Kettle boil; –
And then how sweet to lounge by gurgling Streams,
And dance – and frisk again in Morning Dreams
And when we’ve seen whate’er is fine or frightful –
To tell those pert Miss GRUBS will be delightful.
“For the once noted MARY’S Form enlarges!
“How low the curtsies, – and how high the charges!”
This is great.|||| These were the kind of lines I love in Alexander Pope. Pithy, balanced, knowing. William was succeeding – his poem had started to fly.
In the next few lines, William showed himself remarkably up to date on recent discoveries in earth science:
Geologists, [Gout]-fetter’d, – you, alas!
Cannot with H[U]TT[O]N over Hardknott pass;
Cannot gut Bowfell of his Fossil Stones,
Nor drag to light a British Mammoth’s Bones.
Yet you may study Strate on your Stratum;
If you say ‘pass’ aloud, making it rhyme perfectly with ‘alas’, I think you can hear an echo of William’s accent.
I knew I was biased, but I thought that last line worthy of a Cole Porter lyric.
H[UTTO]N sells Proofs of any Postulatum;
Plutonian or Neptunian, ’tis the same;
H[UTTO]N will sell your Legs, and Eyes and Fame!
What William was writing about were the conflicting geological theories of his time. Big questions about how the world was made, and whether the Bible was right. So, I realized, he wasn’t just a wrestler and a literary man. He was keeping up on popular science, too. The Plutonians were led by the Scottish scientist James Hutton. They asserted that, as part of its ongoing churn, the volcanic earth lifts up seabeds into landmasses and spews out rocks like granite. These big and small features are eroded and swept downstream into the sea. Our world was made in leaping fire, shaped by falling water. The Neptunian theory, as you can probably guess from its name, had a less explosive vision – one of sediments settling at the bottom of vast oceans, now drained away. Noah’s Ark could have floated above Neptunian mountains. By modern times, the Plutonian theory was victorious. Very unusually for him, William doesn’t seem to have felt the need to take sides – although I’m pretty sure he’d have favoured the volcanic.
ARTISTS! prepare a Purse One Year in Seven
Come to your mental Home, your School, your Heaven,
Laden with what would break a Donkey down,
At break of Day set off on Foot from Town;
With Cloth Umbrella, and with Bomb-Proof Shoes,
And sneaking Kindness for a scornful Muse, –
Spouting your Scraps of Verse with Hat in Hand,
Defy the Grins of yonder Rustic Band.
J.W.M. Turner passed through Egremont in 1809. This glimpse was so vivid that I was tempted to place William among the rustic grinners who watched Turner shamble by. In itself, this was masterful word-painting. Who wouldn’t smile at ‘Bomb-Proof Shoes’? We were getting into nonsense verse territory.
But I felt increasingly awkward. I and my kind would definitely be the target here.
Come, ye soft Dilettanti Painters, too;
(Who Fame obtain by libelling all ye view)
Condemn with half-clos’d Eye, and Pedant Phrase,
Scenes on which Angels would delight to gaze.
Welcome! ye half-grown Heirs of ill-got Money,
Who eat, without preparing Pleasure’s Honey;
Ye, who no views can take – may take a Fish
And tasteless else, – may criticize a Dish!
Here dissipation holds her annual court,
And gay REGATTAS offer varied sport;
Here Swains, dead drunk, and hugging each his Brother,
Lie heap’d like sausages one on another.
Now that was nearly genius, wasn’t it? I was full of envy now. Sausages! It gets their shape, the colour of their skins, their clamminess. The rhythm was perfect, the words fell into place. But the final lines were approaching. James Hogg, in ‘The Love Adventures of George Cochrane’, writes, ‘The great art in making poetry, you will observe, is to round the verse well off. If the hindmost line sounds well, the verse is safe’. Go on, William!
Low in the Scale of Social Life descends
The false Refinement that to Ruin tends –
Then haste thee, PEACE! – to Gallic Cities give
All who corrupt – the Land in which they live.
Bingo, as my father would say.
Should I go abroad? Do I corrupt the land in which I live?
After I had finished watching William write his best poem, I felt reassured and undermined at the same time.
Reassured, because he was clearly enough of an all-rounder to figure as a writer as well as a wrestler. A literary critic could descend into one of his poems, line by line, and find gems. I alread
y knew that William’s writings, particularly Wrestliana, had stood the test of time.***
Yet I felt undermined because William seemed to hate me. He hated what I was and what I stood for. Even though I was born so many years later, my politics were still close to the radicalism of the ‘Five-wandering bards’. I think the French Revolution was a good and necessary thing, despite the bloodshed – perhaps because of the bloodshed.
More directly, when I travel to the Lake District, I am an artistic outsider. I’m not like James Rebanks, author of A Shepherd’s Life, going back generations in the same fields. In comparison to him, I’m a rootless cosmopolitan – a ‘cit’.
I came away from ‘The Lakes’ feeling I needed to understand William more as a man of his time, and to see how he related to other men of his time – men a bit like me. Men of letters.
The Wordsworths and the Litts almost certainly went back a generation. It’s likely the two William’s fathers knew one another. Both were employees of the Lowther family, who will come to dominate this book, as they dominated all aspects of life in Cumberland and Westmorland.
Lowther Castle, the shell of which you can still visit, does not stand close to Bowthorn, where John and Isabella Litt raised their family. But the Lowthers – usually headed by an Earl of Lonsdale – controlled life in the north west of England more completely than the King did. They owned every parliamentary seat, they made all the political appointments. You were either their man or hardly a man at all. Added to this, they were rich – the largest private landowners in England.
William Wordsworth’s father had been employed by James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, as his solicitor, and Wordsworth’s own fortunes will sketch the Lowther family – as far as they relate to our William – in adequate detail. James Lowther was known as ‘the Bad Earl’. When Wordsworth’s father died in 1783, the Bad Earl owed him around £4,000. The Bad Earl had spent much of this money buying political influence.
The Bad Earl’s other obsession was with the daughter of one of his tenants. Infamously, he kept her corpse in a glass topped coffin, after she died.
The Bad Earl’s son, confusingly called William and styled Viscount Lowther, was a lot less bad, and in 1802 honourably repaid his father’s debt to the Wordsworth family – allowing the poet to marry and begin a family.
Later still, in 1813, when Wordsworth had moderated his radical politics, Viscount Lowther appointed him Collector of Stamps for Westmorland. This made Wordsworth financially secure, and politically subservient.
When Keats tried to call on Wordsworth during a walking tour of 1818, he found him out ‘canvassing for the Lowthers’ in the General Election. ‘What think you of that [?]… Sad – sad – sad – and yet the family has been his friend always’.
It is absolutely certain that John Litt became Commissioner for Enclosure because he was a Lowther man. And so when Wordsworth’s father was himself out, canvassing for local elections, he would have been sure of a warm welcome and a vote at Bowthorn.
If the father’s got on, the sons didn’t.
In my first research binge at the British Library, I had managed to put William Litt and William Wordsworth in the same place at the same time.
I remember coming back home, after a day of spooling through newspaper pages, and announcing to Leigh, marking undergraduate papers on her laptop, ‘They met. I can prove they met’.
It was at a Regatta on Lake Windermere. A newspaper report of 1824 gives us the occasion in full colour.†††
The grandeur of the mountain scenery, the splendour of the flags waving in the breeze, the firing of cannon, the melody of music, and the blaze of beauty and fashion, all conspire to render the Regatta most enchanting to the senses. – The grand acquatic procession of the barges and numerous row-boats of the Lake, was the most beautiful sight ever witnessed on Windermere. The other amusements of running, leaping, and wrestling, were admirably conducted. The famous Wm. Litt, author of “Wrestliana,” was one of the umpires…. The belt, with five guineas added, was won by Sandys, a Cumberland wrestler, after much skilful and manly exertion… – The young Duke of Buccleugh [17 years 8 months old] was of Colonel Bolton’s party at this exhibition, as was also Mr. Wordsworth, the poet… and nearly the whole of the fashionables of the neighbourhood, including a host of elegant females, were present.
But what did this paragraph prove? The two men had probably met before. Their intercourse on this occasion might have amounted to little more than a nod of the head.
Wordsworth was, basically, a right git to anyone he didn’t respect – and he certainly didn’t respect wrestlers.‡‡‡
I found it very easy to imagine a likely encounter, given Thomas De Quincey’s description of how Wordsworth ‘behaved with absolute insult’ to those he did not value. ‘To everybody’, in other words, ‘standing outside of this sacred and privileged pale’. On these occasions, he ‘did not even appear to listen; but… turned away with an air of perfect indifference; began talking, perhaps, with another person on another subject; or, at all events, never noticed what we said by an apology for an answer’.§§§
However, there was an intermediary – a man who would very much have wanted to bring the man of sport and the man of letters together. In fact, the entire Windermere Regatta had been organized and paid for by this man – his name was John Wilson, although he wrote under the pseudonym ‘Christopher North’.¶¶¶
John Wilson had inherited enough money to indulge his taste for outdoor sports. The news report on the Regatta says, very fulsomely, ‘We may compliment Professor Wilson on the complete success of his exertions in re-establishing this delightful spectacle…’
What goes around comes around. One of the reasons William was being referred to as ‘the famous Wm. Litt’ was because John Wilson had written a long rave review of Wrestliana in the very successful magazine Blackwood’s. And one of the reasons the review was so positive was that, in the book, William had given credit to John Wilson for bringing about a revival in wrestling by providing decent prizes at the games he organized.
John Wilson was one of the writers around and about the Romantic movement who helped develop the ideal of the Sporting Gentleman. He finished his review of Wrestliana referring to the great motto of this ideal: mens sana in corpore sano.
Healthy mind in a healthy body.
I was starting to think it wasn’t such a bad idea.
John Wilson was extremely strident in his own attempts to exist as both healthy mind and healthy body. And it’s that stridency, his efforts becoming more and more ludicrous, that defines Wilson’s character. There is more than a touch of the poodle-walking Norman Mailer about him.
As a student at Oxford, Wilson had thrown himself into as many scraps, against as many opponents, as possible. He was not just fighting for the sake of it, he was fighting to preserve an ideal. ‘“Straightforward” and “manly”; these are terms of the highest approbation in contemporary writing about sport of the non-antipathetic variety’.||||||
John Wilson believed that sport not only taught boys to be men, it taught men to be warriors.
The Romantic era, at its height in the year of the Regatta, gave birth to the idea of the poet as practically disembodied.**** ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’.
The Romantics were not a healthy bunch. Byron, lame, was known as a dirty fighter. Shelley was more cloud in trousers. By the time we get to the second generation, we have Keats – who would probably have lost a stand up fisticuffs with Emily Dickinson. After this, there were a raft of poets who simply wouldn’t deign to get involved – Swinburne, Wilde, Eliot. Attempts to bring health and straightforward masculinity back to English verse seem silly, and always fail. The dandy is a provocative chap, and may start fights, but will rely on others to step in and defend him. D.H. Lawrence would have wished for physical robustness, to match the strong mental health of his poetry. The famous naked wrestling bout in Women in Love is wishful. Lawrence was an ailing, dying man.
; In other words, Wordsworth is where the nerds really take over.
De Quincey relates an anecdote†††† about himself and Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, out for a walk in the vale of Langdale, falling behind Wordsworth and Mr J—, a Westmorland clergyman. De Quincey has already mentioned that Wordsworth looked puny beside Mr J’s, ‘fine towering figure, six feet high, massy and columnar in his proportions’. (William Litt was also six feet high; De Quincey – fine one to talk – was around five foot tall.) As she looked at the two men, in front of her, Dorothy at intervals exclaimed to herself, in a tone of vexation, ‘Is it possible? – can that be William? How very mean he looks!’ and, De Quincey says, she ‘could not conceal a mortification that seemed really painful’.
When I imagine the Williams, Litt and Wordsworth, in the same room or against the same background of green hills, the contrast is just as great.
Looking at Litt, Wordsworth would have seen a confident, rough, physical gentleman; looking back at Wordsworth, Litt would have seen a pretender, a celebrity, a puny specimen.
Turning to look at John Wilson, they would have seen a man desperate to be friends with both of them – and also to combine, in one person, the wrestler’s virtues with the poet’s.
But John Wilson’s attempts to do this already seem strained. The cultural divide between Jock and Nerd was already opening up. In ‘The Lakes’, William had given his Jock’s view of the Nerds. Wordsworth didn’t think the sports he witnessed worth commenting on at all, even in his letters. Nerds wrote about hills and streams, peddlars and waifs, not strong, healthy, young farmers buttocking one another.