WILLIAM
WORDSWORTH
A BIOGRAPHY
Hunter Davies
CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue
1 Cockermouth and Penrith: 1770-1779
2 Hawkshead: 1779-1787
3 Cambridge: 1787-1790
4 France: 1791-1792
5 Mainly London: 1793-1795
6 West Country: 1795-1798
7 Germany and Lyrical Ballads: 1798-1799
8 Dove Cottage: 1800-1802
9 Dorothy and Wedded Bliss: 1802
10 Scotland: 1803
11 A Death in the Family: 1805
12 Coleridge Returns: 1806-1808
13 The Great Estrangement: 1808-1813
14 Fine Folks: 1813-1817
15 Politics and Poems: 1815-1818
16 Mary, Dorothy and the Children: 1813-1820
17 Friends and Relations: 1813-1820
18 Fame: 1820-1830
19 Troubles and Triumphs: 1830-1843
20 Mellow Moods: 1840-1847
21 Last Days: 1847-1850
22 Postscript
The Family Tree of William Wordsworth
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
This biography first came out in 1980 and so, in the nature of things, you might suspect it could well be dreadfully out of date. The basic facts of Wordsworth’s life won’t change. How can they, when we know so much and have so many primary sources, manuscripts and first-hand accounts as proof of what we think we all know about him? Of course, as life moves on, minor details get revealed or re-analysed, research is done in associated, sometimes rather peripheral, fields and, more importantly, with any world-class genius, which Wordsworth certainly was, there is always room for new interpretations, new assessments, which reflect our more modern concerns, attitudes and values. As with Shakespeare, every generation can get something new out of Wordworth.
Nonetheless, why repeat the same old book again, the same as it was, except for this new introduction? The simple answer, which I have to admit I find surprising all these years later, is that it is still, arguably, the only general biography of its type available for the general reader. Presumably, that’s why it’s, always been in print here and in the USA, until very recently.
I like to think it is a serious biography, that all the information is correct and agreed upon by Wordsworth scholars, but it is general in the sense that it is aimed at the ordinary, educated member of the public who probably knows only a little about Wordsworth, wants to know, but is not willing or able to take on a 900-page academic study, crammed with footnotes and lengthy analysis of all his poetry. I wanted to tell his life story, from birth to death, in chronological order, without jumping ahead, or assuming detailed knowledge by the reader. I hate it when biographers make references to a wife and children, or later events and dramas, when they are still in the throes of describing our hero’s childhood. I also wanted to contain it all in 300 or so pages.
I started to do it because I could find nothing which served my purposes. As a Cumbrian, I knew the basics of his life, learned ‘Daffodils’ at school, had visited his birthplace in Cockermouth, done a tour of Dove Cottage, read The Prelude as a student, but I wanted to know more about his whole life and personality. The standard book at the time was by Mary Moorman, in two volumes, 1,200 pages long. Clearly excellent on his poetry, not to say exhaustive, but it was hard work digging out a clear picture of Wordsworth the man. So I decided to do it myself.
Only a complete outsider would have had the cheek or effrontery to try and cram it all into one, straightforward, easily accessible volume. My mind was so clear in the early stages, when I was sure I could see the patterns of his life. As I progressed, it became cloudier. Wordsworth, as he grew older, did so many things at the same time that I had to be ruthless in separating the sections of his life in order to keep up a simple narrative. Ignorance was a great asset.
I wouldn’t attempt such an enterprise again. Not now. I just hadn’t realised how bulky his life was. It took three years full time, not one as I’d planned. For a start there was just so much to read. I used to say to myself, ‘Oh no, why didn’t I pick on someone who’d died young?’ Wordsworth was bulky in his life, living until he was eighty, and also in his writings. His life was three times as long as Keats’s and he produced about four times as much poetry. (70,000 lines as opposed to Keats’s 18,000). With Keats, Shelley and Byron you can hold their life and poetry in your mind, or convince yourself you can, but with Wordsworth, he overwhelms you.
That’s therefore the first reason why there have been few, standard-length biographies. The academics either write whoppers or concentrate on one part of his life, usually his early years. A lot of the experts tend to know a great deal about one part of Wordsworth’s life, which makes it harder for them to see the whole, and it also makes it difficult for them to communicate what they do know to the general public.
While getting a grip on his whole life is hard for the expert, and more so for the complete outsider, there’s also the problem of getting a foothold on the Wordsworth world. Wordsworth has been captured by the scholars, his large body taken away and carved up hungrily into smaller and smaller chunks as they share out the meat amongst themselves. They suspect interlopers and jealously guard their own morsels. It did take me a while to be trusted, but in the end I was allowed loose on the entrails and received nothing but help and generosity.
I will be eternally grateful to the late and wonderful Dr Robert Woof, director and creator of the modern Wordsworth Trust, who died in 2005. When I’d finished my manuscript, I sent it to Robert for his comments. He took weeks to reply, as he was ever on the move, and I began to think he’d never get round to it. Then one night he turned up at our London home clutching my precious pages in a plastic carrier bag. After four hours of what turned out to be an intense tutorial, going through it line by line, he realised he’d missed his train back to Newcastle. ‘Not to worry,’ he said, curling up on the sofa, where he slept the night. The next day, at dawn, we carried on, till he ’d finally given me his considered judgment on every page.
I remember him disliking my use of the word ‘hippy’ to describe Wordsworth in his post-student years, but I argued it was a phrase present-day readers would understand. He also got upset when I referred to the ‘Wordsworth industry’. It just wasn’t true, he said, and gave the wrong impression. I was partly doing it to tease. I knew, back in 1980, just how hard he was working to raise money, acquire treasures, expand the work and scope of the Wordsworth Trust.
While working on the book, I did have one bit of luck. A collection of letters between Wordsworth and his wife turned up which revealed a degree of passion and intimacy between them which had not been evident before (see Chapter 16). No one knew where the letters had come from, or how, or to whom they had originally belonged. They were the ‘property of a gentleman’, according to Sotherby’s catalogue. Cornell University bid £38,500 and they were therefore destined to leave the country.
By a sequence of events, I managed to find out who was selling them. It was a man from Carlisle, my home town, a stamp dealer from whom I had bought stamps, as I was at one time a keen collector. He’d acquired a large bundle of old letters and was going through them for their stamp content, looking for Penny Blacks, burning anything which looked boring, when he noticed the name Wordsworth and the address Rydal Mount. He’d heard of Dove Cottage, but not Rydal Mount, and so he sent a colleague to Tullie House, where Carlisle’s Reference Library used to be. He discovered that Rydal Mount had indeed once been a William Wordsworth home. He stopped burning
, realising he might have stumbled on some valuable literary letters.
Dove Cottage, when I told them all this, quickly started their own investigation into the history of the letters. As a result, they managed to delay their export. They amassed enough funds and were able to pay Cornell and thus keep the letters in Britain, where they are to this day, safe at Dove Cottage.
There hasn’t been a similarly exciting find in the subsequent years, though a great many interesting and valuable letters, manuscripts, books, paintings and prints have been acquired. More research is being done all the time, more study undertaken, and every year, about ten new books and studies are published. The Wordsworth industry—sorry, the fascination with Wordsworth—shows no sign of contracting.
In 1998 there appeared a new biography of him called The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. You have to admit it’s a great title, hinting of John le Carre, perhaps a touch of James Bond. Wish I’d thought of something like that instead of the obvious, flat, boring, unadorned title I’d used. It was written by Kenneth Johnston, a distinguished professor of English at Indiana University, an acknowledged expert on Wordsworth and the Romantics. His title might have appeared a bit of a come-hither, but the book was clearly an academic work and ran to 965 pages, including 71 pages of notes.
In it, he spent a lot of time proving, or at least heavily suggesting, that Wordsworth was a lot more sexually experienced than anyone had realised, consorting with prostitutes in Cambridge and dancing girls in Europe. But perhaps his most astonishing claim was that while in Germany, Wordsworth was a paid spy, working for Britain’s newly formed Secret Service. Hence the snazzy title. Professor Johnston had studied a hitherto unknown Foreign Office document from 1799 which recorded that Mr Wordsworth had been paid £1912 for espionage duties. Wow. What a discovery.
However, scholars being as they are—i.e. a mass of sceptics, mockers, know-alls, rivals, just like most professions—it was quickly pointed out that Professor Johnston had got the wrong Wordsworth. It was Robinson Wordsworth, one of his cousins, who’d received the espionage payment.
Two years later, in 2000, the paperback version of his book was published. It was now slightly shorter, cut down to a more manageable 690 pages, and the mistaken identity had been corrected. The original title had also been truncated. Now it was simply The Hidden Wordsworth, with the exciting strapline discarded. It can be a rough world out there in academia.
As for Wordsworth’s sex life, in later life there was the impression that he was above such things, preferring porridge and cold water, but we all now know about one sexual affair, kept secret in his lifetime, which you will come to in the process of reading this book. Were there others we still don’t know about? Possibly. But not even a general biographer should dare suggest it, without at least some fairly solid supporting evidence.
Of all the new biographical studies that have appeared since 1980 there are two which can be heartily recommended, even though they are of an academic nature. Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: A Life came out in 1989 and is still looked upon as probably today’s standard biography of Wordsworth, the poet. It is heavily lit crit, as befits an Oxford don, but not too long, just 525 pages. The other, which has exactly the same title, is by Juliet Barker and first appeared in 2000. It’s much bigger, with 971 pages, including 120 pages of footnotes, and is very detailed. While Gill’s strength is on the poetry, Juliet Barker is particularly good on the historical, social and family background. She also spends as much time and space on the latter half of Wordsworth’s life as on the first, which not many biographers do, preferring to concentrate on the dramatic events and wonderful poetry of his first half. So if you have both books, you should find all you might possibly need to know, and more, until the next wave.
I hope many readers will go on to at least one of them, having read my humbler offering, but of course every reader, and every human come to that, should make their own pilgrimage to the Lake District and visit the homes associated with Wordsworth’s life—his birthplace in Cockermouth, Dove Cottage in Grasmere and Rydal Mount, outside Ambleside, where he lived the latter part of his life. There have been huge changes and developments in two of them at least since this book first came out.
Wordsworth House in Main Street, Cockermouth, was reopened in 2004 after being closed for major alterations. It has always suffered slightly in the Wordsworth pecking order by being on the edge of the Lakes, away from the tourist honey traps, and also in not having many original objects or material owned by the Wordworth family. On its reopening, it emerged with some of the staff in period cosumes—working in the kitchen, cooking real food on a real fire. It did sound a bit naff, but they do carry it off well and it does help give the interior a real atmosphere. The house itself is of course a Georgian gem, still the finest in Cockermouth, and with a marvellous garden, beautifully cared for. It’s not a place for academic research, and they don’t pretend otherwise, but it provides an excellent introduction to Wordsworth’s life by seeing where he was born and brought up, getting a feeling of the sort of family he came from. Children love it—especially the dressing-up box where they can put on period clothes and prance around the bedroom. Annual attendance is now 30,000, compared with 20,000 ten years earlier. So the changes worked.
Dove Cottage, by comparison, is All Souls, a place of learning and reverence, though they too have their fun parts and their interactive learning sides. The whole site has been enormously expanded since 1980, mainly thanks to the brilliant work of Robert Woof. Their museum, at the time I used to go there when first writing this book, was in a barn. Now they have two state-of-the-art, architect-designed, award-winning buildings—apart from Dove Cottage itself.
Firstly there’s the Wordsworth Museum, which, like Dove Cottage, is open to the public on the same ticket. Then there’s the Jerwood Centre, opened by Seamus Heaney in 2005, which is essentially the library, a place of study and research, containing books and original manuscripts. Altogether, the Wordsworth Trust now has 63,000 items related to Wordsworth and his times, ranging from manuscripts and books to paintings, prints and drawings. They have hugely expanded their horizons and now cover the whole Romantic movement, in art and literature, stretching from 1750-1850.
Millions of pounds have been raised to acquire and create all these treasures and most academic and literary folks now believe it is the world’s best literary museum. There are always new, handsomely produced books appearing about their treasures and several hundred events are organised each year at Dove Cottage. There is an annual summer school which usually attracts at least fifty of the world’s greatest literary scholars, from Japan to the USA.
Dove Cottage now has a permanent staff of over thirty, plus ten interns who come and work, study and live there for a year. Their annual turnover is £1.3 million and they own some twenty properties. Dove Cottage has in fact become a campus.
Academic interest in Wordsworth has never been so high and is still expanding, as can be seen in the quality of their events and the number of scholars arriving from universities around the world—and yet, for some reason, the actual number of visitors to Dove Cottage has recently gone down. It was 80,000 when this book first came out. Now it’s 61,000.
It could be that in 1980, most ordinary Brits, and English speakers around the world, did know a little about Wordsworth. They had all learned ‘Daffodils’ at school, even if it was by rote, getting their knuckles slapped. Now that doesn’t happen. Dove Cottage therefore has to work harder to get people in off the street, make them aware and interested in someone they have possibly never heard of.
‘I would put it that today we are enjoying an opportunity to bring Wordsworth to people who haven’t yet come across his work,’ says Jeff Cowton, Curator of the Wordsworth Trust. ‘Yes, we do have to work hard, but it is part of our mission as an educational charity to do that very thing.’
There’s also the problem of competition for leisure time, people wanting to go abroad for their holidays
, as opposed to the rainy old Lake District. Inside Lakeland, rival attractions have greatly increased, especially in the Beatrix Potter industry. (I’m standing by that description—you just have to look at all the BP souvenirs in all the shops, then imagine the factories belting them out.)
The BP tourist industry recently had a huge fillip with a major motion picture, Miss Potter, especially when it hit the Japanese market. All the BP sites in Lakeland reported attendances up 20 per cent.
This new edition of WW’s biography, which of course will have readers stampeding for it in the nation’s bookshops, will help alert the general public to the wonders of Wordsworth, but there is something else which would help even more.
As you read on, you’ll soon discover such dramas, plus, deaths, childhood traumas, legal wrangles, visions, warring geniuses, magnificent poetry, awful rows, sex, possible incest, unrequited love, mysteries, spies—OK perhaps not spies. If any producers are interested, the film rights to this book are still available. Wordsworth: The Movie: that’s clearly what’s needed next.
Hunter Davies
Loweswater, 2009
PROLOGUE
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH fell in love with his childhood. He loved it at the time—well, almost all of it—but he loved it even more as he grew older. When he was twenty-eight, and sitting rather cold and homesick in a small town in Germany, he started to write a poem about his life. This vast autobiographical poem, which was later called The Prelude, is the account of a man and his mind growing up. It is mainly about his schooldays and early manhood, and in it he recalls in great detail and with great emotion his early experiences and impressions. It is often philosophical, as he tries to interpret and analyse some very strange, almost mystical experiences.
Many of us have had strange experiences as children, strange in the sense that, for no apparent reason, they stick in our minds long after they have happened, long after they have ceased to make any real sense to us. Most of them don’t bear repeating. They only have any meaning for ourselves. As we get older, we find it hard to believe that they ever happened, and wonder if perhaps we shaped them to suit ourselves because we were told they happened to us. As we age, they all fade.
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