Two things distinguish Wordsworth in his obsession with childhood. Firstly, his visions, his moments of mysticism, were unusually deep and clear. He felt not just a communion with nature and the world of the Spirits, but that he was a part of them, beyond normal life, and that he had left his human frame. He often had to touch himself afterwards, or feel a solid wall, to reassure himself that he was back in the real world. These visions were so strong that he could remember them vividly ever afterwards, recall them in tranquillity, re-create at will his original childhood sensations. Secondly, his visions were not restricted to his childhood. These spots of time, as he called them, continued to recur, or so he thought, well into adulthood. They were a mark of his poetic inspiration, and when they started to go, so some would say, his muse began to fade.
Wordsworth knew that his childhood, and his childhood visions, were important to him, which was why he wanted to capture and define them in The Prelude. But The Prelude is more than simply a list of his mystical experiences. Few poets have ever been so practical, so sane, so healthy, so down-to-earth. In The Prelude, he also describes all his everyday, common-or-garden, school and growing-up experiences, the sort we can all identify with, the facts of the matter, such as he remembered them.
Without The Prelude, we would know very little about the details of Wordsworth’s early years. The Prelude is a basic source. It is all written from Wordsworth’s point of view, which is to be expected. No-one else was bothering to make notes on an unknown young man growing up in a remote area of the north of England, so we have to rely on it. The mass of letters and diaries and memories, so dense that they can overwhelm an unsuspecting biographer, do not appear till much later. It means, therefore, that the facts of Wordsworth’s early life can be simply stated.…
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Cockermouth and Penrith
1770–1779
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born in Cockermouth in Cumberland on 7 April 1770. It is true, as he subsequently said, that he was ‘much favour’d in his birthplace’. Both in the physical setting and in the fortunes of his family at that time, his birth and his begetting were very solid, very professional, very middle-class. It could be argued that in some respects it was more than favoured. For a brief time, before certain unfavourable things occurred, it was rather privileged.
The house, for a start, is still to this day the handsomest house in Cockermouth. It stands in the main street, with seventeen windows at the front, and was built in 1745 by a Sheriff of Cumberland. In those days Cockermouth had only one street and Wordsworth’s house was on the northern, the better favoured side, with its rear terrace backing on to the banks of the River Derwent. The opposite side backed on to common lands, lands fast being taken over and gobbled up by the local lordly family.
Cockermouth, then as now, was a clean, cheerful, watery little market town. The name comes from the River Cocker, which flows into the River Derwent not far from Wordsworth’s house, though you don’t come across the Cocker in many literary remembrances. It’s not exactly a poetic name, though the river itself is beautiful enough and arrives at Cockermouth from the Vale of Lorton, flowing up from the heart of the Lakes through Crummock and Buttermere. Wordsworth as a boy played on its banks just as much as he played by the Derwent, but he gives the Cocker only one mention in The Prelude, and even then he calls it ‘Coker’s stream’. The Derwent, on the other hand, he calls the ‘fairest of all rivers’, and it looms large in all Lakeland literary legends.
Strictly speaking, Cockermouth isn’t in the Lake District. It’s to the north-west of Lakeland proper, in the coastal plain, more connected in landscape and feeling to the Solway, to Carlisle and the Border country. You can certainly see the heights of Lakeland, to the south and to the east, and Wordsworth was fond of remembering his early views of Skiddaw, but you need to have good eyes and know where to direct them. Today, the Lakeland National Park boundary line takes what looks like a spiteful loop as it approaches Cockermouth, rejecting it, placing it firmly, as it always has been, outside the Lakes.
Wordsworth’s father was called John; he was living in Cockermouth at the time of William’s birth because his business was directed mainly to the west coast of Cumberland. All his five children were born in Cockermouth, starting with Richard, the eldest, in 1768. William was next, two years later; then came Dorothy, the only girl, in 1771. There was John in 1772 and finally Christopher in 1774. It was a neatly spaced family, with the girl in the middle, though five children in six years would be considered rather impetuous today. There were no still-births, as far as we know, nor any childhood deaths, both of which were unfortunately more than common back in the 1770s.
John Wordsworth was an attorney at law and was employed as an agent for Sir James Lowther. He hadn’t been living long in Cockermouth, moving there just a year or so before his marriage in 1766, four years before William’s birth, from Penrith on the other side of Cumberland. He was twenty-five when he married and his wife Ann had just turned eighteen. He had been picked out as a bright young man by Sir James Lowther, given a very important job and the equally important-looking house to live in, while still a relatively inexperienced lawyer—in fact, it looks as though he got the job just before he finally qualified. He was helped by the fact that his father, Richard, had also been employed as agent for Sir James Lowther. It always helps, in being spotted early, to have family connections.
Richard Wordsworth (William’s grandfather) had been Receiver-General of Cumberland and Clerk of the Peace. During 1745, when Bonny Prince Charlie’s men had marched through Penrith, Richard had fled into the hills with the county’s money, leaving his wife to guard the family house at Sockbridge, three miles from Penrith. Over the years, he had built up an estate and some property, mainly thanks to his work and his associations with the Lowther family; but he’d done it on his own, from all accounts. He had originally come over the border from Yorkshire, the son of a squire who had invested unwisely in coalmines. In the Wordsworth family, there was a tradition that they’d originated from Wadsworth (‘the Woollen Cloth Town’) near Halifax.
The important job which John Wordsworth, William’s father, was given was to look after the Lowther interests in west Cumberland, particularly his political interests. This was the day of the rotten boroughs, when a local lord could control a parliamentary constituency, putting in his own MP and directing those few freeholders who had the vote. Franchise went with property and it was Sir James’s habit to send his representatives round buying up houses and land when he decided to move into a new area, which was how he came to own the Wordsworth house in Cockermouth. At one time, Sir James controlled nine parliamentary seats, a large number even by rotten borough standards. The Younger Pitt first entered Parliament as a Member for Appleby, one of the seats in the Lowther gift. Sir James married a daughter of Lord Bute, who became Prime Minister in 1763, and he was a stout Tory, making sure all his political power and influence were directed to the Tory cause, but he himself was an idiosyncratic Tory, highly independent, going his own way if he thought that would be better for the Lowthers.
The Lowthers have been at Lowther, a village south of Penrith, for almost a thousand years, and the family are still the biggest private landowners in the whole of the Lake District. They dominated life in Cumberland and Westmorland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, running the twin counties like a feudal estate. They certainly dominated Wordsworth’s life, for better and for worse. They first became enormously wealthy in the early eighteenth century, when Sir James, and his father Sir John, almost single-handedly brought the Industrial Revolution to the north-west of England, introducing it to west Cumberland decades before it reached Lancashire. They used their landed wealth to move into mines, iron ore and shipping, building up the little inlet of Whitehaven, which had consisted of only three houses in 1680, into a boom town of twelve thousand people when Wordsworth first visited it as a little boy some hundred years later. They created Whitehaven in style, being masters of all they s
urveyed, bringing in an architect to design the town from scratch, making it one of the earliest examples of town-planning in the world, hiring the best engineers and using the newest developments of the day, such as steam power to pump water out of the coal-mines and developing natural gas.
It is astonishing to realize that Whitehaven in 1780 was, after London, the most important port in the country—far ahead of Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow or Newcastle. Its wealth came from the coal trade to Ireland, the tobacco trade with Virginia and the slave trade with Africa. It’s a rather humbler town today, a left-over town in many ways, though newer industries are now beginning to thrive. Some elegant streets remain and there are Tangier House and Tangier Street in the middle of the town, reminders of the earlier, exotic days.
John Wordsworth rode up and down the coast attending to his master’s business—he didn’t have a coach, as the roads were so bad, though he did have a liveried servant. One of his positions, which the Lowthers put in his way, was being Coroner of Millom, at the southern tip of the Cumberland peninsula. It was a tough, rather thankless job, exacting the last penny and the last bit of influence on behalf of the Lowther family, though there was some fun at election time. John Wordsworth had to make sure that Lowther voters were well entertained with drinks and hospitality, giving them little gifts and inducements, just in case they forgot where their loyalties lay. On the whole, though, this didn’t make him popular. The Lowthers were feared, not loved, for their success: ‘provincial monarchs of unmeasured lands’, they were called. They were certainly not known for their generous spirits. Sir James Lowther, who was created Earl of Lonsdale in 1784, was mean and grasping. Even today, he is referred to in the family as ‘Wicked Jimmy’. But he did at least give John Wordsworth and his young family a rent-free house and there were certain stipends and some status which came with the jobs which he put in Wordsworth’s way, such as being Coroner. John Wordsworth, luckily, had some money and property of his own, such as the Sockbridge estate, which he’d inherited from his father.
Not much is known about the personality of John Wordsworth. He was continually away from home and it was said in the family that he had no real friends, but this might have been the fault of the Lowther connection, not of his own character. However, he was an educated and liberal man, knowledgeable about books and poetry, and it was he who first gave William an interest in literature, introducing him to Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels and The Arabian Nights, teaching him to learn by heart large portions of Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser.
Ann Wordsworth, William’s mother, was born Ann Cookson, the daughter of William Cookson, a linen draper in Penrith. On the surface, these origins are definitely ‘trade’, and professional people, such as lawyers, usually consider themselves a cut above shopkeepers; but the Cooksons were an established Penrith family, albeit petit bourgeois, and owned property and land in and around Penrith. Ann’s father had done particularly well for himself by marrying into the county set, the Crackenthorpes of Newbiggen Hall. It looks as if the Crackenthorpes weren’t all that excited by their daughter marrying a draper, and his profession wasn’t given when they compiled their family tree, but the marriage gave William Cookson some extra social standing and he brought up his own family with definite pretensions, even if they all did live above the shop. Their eldest son Christopher eventually changed his name to Crackenthorpe in order to inherit the Crackenthorpe estates and went to live in Newbiggen Hall; the next son went on to become a Canon of Windsor; and their daughter Ann did well, of course, as John Wordsworth was obviously such a bright young lawyer from a good family with good connections.
Young William, then, and his three brothers and one sister, had some well-off grandparents and some rising and well-connected uncles, not to mention those powerful Lowthers in the background, as they all played happily in that big house in Cockermouth.
One of William’s earliest memories was of going to visit an uncle, Richard Wordsworth, Controller of Customs at Whitehaven, with his little sister Dorothy. ‘My sister, when she first heard the voice of the sea, and beheld the scene before her, burst into tears.… This fact was often mentioned among us as indicating the sensibility for which she was so remarkable.’
Dorothy was apparently extremely sensitive from an early age, and when William went tearing wildly after butterflies, trying to catch them, Dorothy was the one who feared for them, lest rough young William should brush the dust from their wings. They roamed the river banks together, with William bathing naked in the nearby mill race from the age of five (so he said), running abroad in wantonness, sporting like a naked savage (so he said). For a conventional, middle-class family of the times, which employed a nurse to look after the children and at least one maidservant, William was allowed a remarkable amount of freedom. From all accounts, he demanded a great amount of freedom. Compared with his elder brother Richard, who was solid and conventional, or John, who was very quiet, or Christopher, who was clever but conservative, William was definitely the wild one.
In the early childhood sections of The Prelude there are as many references to the beauties of nature, such as the rivers and the mountains, as to times of uproar and tumult. Those periods of silent contemplation were often followed by spells of what sounds like violent tempers and tantrums. It seemed his mother could hardly control him, perhaps with a father so often away, and the family often wondered how she had given birth to such a difficult child. Their Penrith relations, on both sides, told her from the earliest days that they considered William more than a handful. She was a soft and gentle woman, who helped to stir William’s more sensitive side, and he was grateful for her good influence over him, whereas his father is scarcely ever mentioned. She worried most about him, of all her five children, and feared for his journey through life, with such a violent and moody personality. She predicted, so William later recalled, that he was destined to be remarkable ‘either for good or for evil’.
William went to school in Cockermouth, to the local grammar school, which was then run by the Rev. Joseph Gillbanks, who was also vicar of the parish. He didn’t learn much there, and it’s not known exactly how many years he attended school in Cockermouth (he was definitely there in 1776, when he was six, as his father’s accounts, which have survived, show). The school had a poor reputation; the headmaster had been married four times, which deeply upset the nonconformist element in the town, and was eventually forced to retire.
One of William’s contemporaries at Cockermouth was Fletcher Christian, later famous—or infamous—for his part in the mutiny on the Bounty. The Christians were a well-known local family, family friends of the Wordsworths, with good connections and with several members who went on to become eminent lawyers. There was a third young man growing up at the same time in the Cockermouth area who went on to achieve national fame—John Dalton, father of the atomic theory—but his path and William’s never crossed. It is intriguing, nonetheless, to realize that one small, out-of-the-way town should have three celebrated sons, all growing up in the 1770s.
There was also one contemporary local event which stirred the outside world. It occurred in 1778, during the American War of Independence, when William was eight. This was the raid by John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born American naval hero, on Whitehaven harbour. It is nowhere mentioned in Wordsworth’s poems—and he used many local events—which is surprising as he had Whitehaven relations, knew the harbour, was interested in the sea and had relatives who were sailors. One can only assume that he was over on the other side of Cumberland, with his grandparents in Penrith, at the time of the raid, and somehow missed the news.
Throughout these early years, William and his sister and brothers were continually being moved back and forth, between Cockermouth and Penrith. It is not clear why, at least in the very early days, this should have been so. Possibly his mother wanted a stricter upbringing for William, hoping a spell with his grandparents would knock him into shape. Perhaps it was thought that a school in Penrith might do more f
or him than Mr Gillbanks had done. Perhaps in a bigger town he would have less freedom to roam the countryside and get into mischief. For various reasons, then, Penrith began to play a bigger part in his life than Cockermouth.
Penrith, the home town of each of Wordsworth’s parents, was in the late eighteenth century quite a cosmopolitan little town, at least by Cumbrian standards—which, by London standards, would not be saying very much. Unlike Cockermouth, stuck out on a limb in the plain, neither Lakeland nor coastal, Penrith always had a definite identity and a definite character. It is on the main north-south route between England and Scotland, one of the arteries of England, and many invaders have left their mark on Penrith, from Romans, Angles, Saxons and Danes, to marauding Scots, though it was the original Britons who gave Penrith its name: the prefix Pen, as in so many Welsh names, is Celtic.
Penrith’s little industries and activities, as befits a town used by travellers, were dominated by brewing and by traders of all sorts, cattle-dealers and shopkeepers. Bull-baiting still flourished in the town until about 1790, defended by the burghers as being a good advertisement for the new lot of meat that would soon be on sale, softened up by all the baiting.
The Cooksons’ draper’s shop was in the market square: a red sandstone building, like almost every house and shop in Penrith. Dorothy used to help out occasionally in the shop and the grandmother did her bit, though there was an ample staff. Dorothy and her brother William (their Cookson grandparents were also called Dorothy and William) were sent to a local dame school run by Ann Birkett, which considered it catered for the quality of Penrith. William even boasted in later years that it taught the ‘upper classes’ of the town. It didn’t in effect teach William much more than the Cockermouth school, but it appears to have been stricter and more old-fashioned.
William Wordsworth Page 2