William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  It is strange to realize that the Lakes were already attracting visitors. We tend to think of Wordsworth’s Lakes as being pre-trippers and preholiday homes, an undiscovered sylvan paradise, but the discovery of Lakeland coincided almost exactly with Wordsworth’s birth. The first guide-books, by people like West and Gilpin, appeared in the 1770s and were very successful. Wordsworth read them avidly. The poem he was now writing, An Evening Walk, showed the current fashion for landscape descriptions. The guides were meant for gentlemen, those with taste and discrimination, who were looking for the picturesque, who could be led to certain beauty spots and there feast their eyes or get out their paints and pencils and record the picturesque scene. These spots were called ‘stations’ and there was one not far from Hawkshead, overlooking Windermere, which Wordsworth was very fond of visiting.

  Along with the gentlemen trippers came the first of the second-homers, the first wave of Lancashire industrialists who were already building or buying lavish holiday homes on the slopes of Windermere. They brought a completely new social class to Lakeland life. It had always been a fairly classless life anyway: the central dales were dominated by small-scale yeomen farmers (‘statesmen’, as they were called, because of their small estates), whereas the local aristocracy (feudal overlords, such as the Lowthers) lived on the fringes, in the plains of the Eden valley, well away from the mountains. The new, wealthy summer visitors gave big parties, regattas and hunts, organized fancy-dress balls and competitions for the best-decorated boats, and their daughters looked forward avidly to the holiday festivities. They weren’t all complete strangers to the area. Several families who lived in industrial west Cumberland, for example the Curwens from Workington, had for years possessed a country home in the Lakes. The Curwens had theirs right in the middle of Windermere, on Belle Isle.

  There’s a nice contemporary letter, written in 1786, by a young lady living over in Bassenthwaite, Mary Spedding of Armathwaite Hall, whose brother John was at school with William, to a girl friend in Hawkshead with whom she’d spent a previous summer holiday. In the letter, she is complaining about the lack of suitable men for dances in her area. ‘So little Hawkshead still retains its superiority. I believe sc great a majority of Beaux can seldom be boasted of in this part of the world.’

  William enjoyed the parties and dances and many a time spent al night at them, returning home in the early hours. It was after one such party, perhaps with the Curwens on Windermere, full of the usual dancing, gaiety and mirth, of maids and youths enjoying themselves, dancing the night away, that he had a strange experience as he walked home with the cock crowing, the birds wakening and the labourers going to their fields. It was a beautiful sunrise and the mountains looked as bright as clouds. During this walk, it came to Wordsworth that what he had to do in life was be a ‘Dedicated Spirit’. An unknown bone was given to him, one which it would be a sin to ignore. It wasn’t a great mystical experience, like others he describes in The Prelude: just a simple realization of his duty in life. He doesn’t even say it mean: he had to be a poet, though everyone accepts that’s what is meant. This dedication section has been scrambled over by countless scholars, looking for clues, and those who think it refers to Windermere have always been foxed by a line which says the ‘sea was laughing at a distance’. You would have to have had quite a few drinks to hear the sea from Windermere. Wherever the revelation took place, and however Wordsworth shaped the details afterwards, he suddenly saw clearly what he must do. Confused by these new conflicting experiences and sensations, Wordsworth made his choice for the conduct of his future life.

  Back in Cambridge, he decided to create his own pattern of study for the next two years. From now on, he devoted his time to his own reading, including modern authors and modern subjects, and to learning foreign languages. It’s not clear how much he actually read, though he told everybody that was what he was doing, but he definitely took instruction in Italian from an old gentleman called Isola, who had been a friend of Thomas Gray at Cambridge. This was about the only teacher at Cambridge Wordsworth had any respect for. He seems to have despised the rest.

  It was a brave thing to do, for an impoverished student: deliberately ruining all his chances of a proper and secure career. But from his early days William had been a rebel, headstrong and determined, whether he was defying his Penrith grandparents or his Cambridge teachers, demanding to be free to go his own way. Why did he not just leave, as many disenchanted students have done, before and since? The answer must be that, though he disliked the place, there was no money and nothing else for him to do. The future was obscure, so he might as well make the most of the present. He says in The Prelude, rather arrogantly, that he decided he was a Chosen Son, so why grieve or be cast down or even feel guilty?

  Dorothy worried on his behalf, being most upset when she heard that he’d opted out of the Tripos course. In his second year he was ‘unplaced’, which meant he had not sat the full examination, though he had taken a paper in Classics and done quite well in that. In her regular letters, Dorothy reassured her friends, who were equally concerned about her wayward brother, that he was reading quite a lot and was ‘acquainted’ with French, Spanish and Italian.

  The uncles were more than upset. They were furious. William had called in at Penrith, as he had done during his first long summer holiday from Cambridge, but hadn’t stayed long. Uncle Kit, after one of William’s brief visits, wrote complaining about his conduct to his elder brother Richard, now a young lawyer in London. ‘I should have been happy if he had favoured me with more of his company, but I’m afraid I’m out of his good graces.… I am sorry to say that I think your Bro. William very extravagant. He has had very near £300 since he went to Cambridge which I think is a very shameful sum for him to spend, considering his expectations.’

  His family wanted him to stick to the Tripos and become a Wrangler, and that way his life would be secure, and his family and all his well-wishers happy; but William took no notice. Even his kind Uncle William, the Fellow of his college, began to despair of him.

  The Master of the college died in March 1789. As was the custom of the day, literary-minded students from the college pinned on the coffin some nicely composed verses of appreciation. William, however, refused, saying he had had no connection with the dead man, nor any interest in him, so why should he write something. His uncle couldn’t understand it. Here was his nephew, who had given up all proper study because he was supposedly only interested in poetry, not taking an opportunity to distinguish himself by having his verse read by the Cambridge public.

  William had become positively anti-clerical by this time. There is no evidence, either way, of any interest in religion while he was at school, nor in his early poetry, but at Cambridge he actively despised the old clerics and deans of the university, finding more wisdom and goodness in the old shepherds back in Hawkshead. Daily chapel attendance was compulsory at Cambridge, and the rules were strict in this, if in few other departments of Cambridge life. William found it all a mockery, a disgraceful and empty gesture, and he attacked it vociferously in The Prelude.

  Perhaps William’s most defiant gesture during his Cambridge years was to go off in his last summer vacation, just a few months before the final examinations, on a holiday across France to the Alps. His relations still had hopes that he would come to his senses in his final year, see the light at last and catch up with some frantic holiday revising, as others had done, and in the end get some sort of respectable honours degree, enough for his good connections to ease him into a comfortable niche. He didn’t even tell Dorothy, his beloved sister, he was going, not until he’d set off. He knew that even she would think he was absolutely mad.…

  We left Dorothy still having a hard time with the Penrith grandparents, but Uncle William came to her rescue, just as he had tried to come to William’s.

  In William’s second year, Uncle William got married to the daughter of the vicar of Penrith and resigned his Fellowship to take up a rather well-appo
inted living in Norfolk, a gift of St John’s. The newly-weds asked Dorothy to come with them, to be a kind of housekeeper, and Dorothy jumped at the chance of leaving Penrith. On their way to Norfolk, they spent a few hours in Cambridge, and William was able to show Dorothy round the sights. Later on, he went to visit them in Norfolk, but it was by this time that his uncle was beginning to realize that William was not going to be the scholar he’d expected. Dorothy and William went for long walks, up and down the huge garden of the vicarage, discussing their idealistic plans for the future, their worries about the Lowthers and about whether they would ever get their right-ful inheritance. Dorothy loved such visits, but eventually her uncle made it clear that William was no longer a welcome visitor.

  Dorothy made her home with her uncle and aunt for the next seven years, acting as a nurse to their children when they started to arrive, but she had to keep her contact with William as quiet as possible. Not only had he become unwelcome: it looks as if he was now thought to be an undesirable influence on young Dorothy, and someone of whom the family had become ashamed.

  William’s and Dorothy’s joint fantasy at the time, which they discussed together and which Dorothy continually mentioned in letters to her close friends, was that one day they would set up house together, sharing life in a beautiful village—Grasmere is mentioned as one possibility—and be happy ever after, just the two of them.

  Dorothy kept in touch with all her brothers—even Richard, a very tardy letter-writer, now in London—and with young John, now a sailor, who had just taken up a junior position on the Earl of Abergavenny and had gone on a voyage to the West Indies; but she was always closest to William. She did feel that, as five stranded orphans, they had to huddle together for protection, especially herself and the unloved William. It is not surprising that she should have created fantasies of a future life with her favourite brother. As a woman, she had no possibility of a career of her own. Her destiny lay either in going into service, getting married or living with one of her brothers.

  There’s no record of any boy friends in her life, though one of her friends did tease her about the possibility of romance with Mr Wilberforce—yes, William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery philanthropist. He came to spend a month with her uncle, being an old Cambridge friend of his, and was very impressed by a little class that Dorothy was running at the time for local poor children, teaching them reading, spelling and knitting. Mr Wilberforce gave her ten guineas a year, to spend for the poor children in any way she wanted.

  ‘My heart is perfectly disengaged,’ she replied to her friend Jane Pollard in Halifax, who’d obviously made certain hints in her letter, on hearing what Mr Wilberforce had done. ‘I would make a confidante of you, had there been any foundations for your suspicions. Mr W would, were he ever to marry, look for a Lady possessed of many more accomplishments than I can boast.…’

  There had still been only one girl in William’s life: the girl from his early Penrith schooldays, Mary Hutchinson; but she already seems to have become more of an old friend than a girl friend—someone he just happened to have grown up with. He did visit her during those first two Cambridge holidays when he went to Penrith. After all, he did like parties and dancing and was not unaware of girls being plain or pretty. But she, apparently, was on the plain side.

  During his final year at Cambridge, he seems to have turned his back on thoughts of Mary, not visiting her any more, never contemplating a life with anyone else, apart from Dorothy. Was he simply being kind to Dorothy, stuck away in the country parsonage, or did he mean it? He certainly didn’t discuss everything with her, or she would have known beforehand about his final Cambridge holiday in France. Perhaps he feared she might worry about his future, as much as everyone else seemed to be worrying, and want him to devote his final vacation to his books.

  He came back to Cambridge in October 1790, after his summer holiday in France and before the time to sit for his final examinations. ‘I am very anxious about him just now,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘as he will shortly have to provide for himself; next year he takes his degree, when he will go into orders I do not know, nor how he will employ himself. He must when he is three and twenty either go into orders or take pupils.’

  In January 1791, William received his degree, an unclassified BA. He had not sat for the full examinations and so couldn’t get an honours degree. There was no possibility of a fellowship, which would have seen comfortably to his needs for the next three years, till he could be ordained—that is, if he was still going to be ordained. He had no idea what he wanted to do. The one or two remaining friendly relations talked of putting a curacy in his way, when the time came, and in her letters to her friends, Dorothy’s little dreams now took place in a parsonage, not a cottage, as she visualized the snug little parlour and bright little fire by which they would sit and converse together; but William had no such clear or clerical thoughts. Once he’d been admitted to his BA, he was on the road to London.

  He was glad to get Cambridge behind him. From the very beginning, he had realized he was a stranger there. ‘A feeling that I was not for that hour, not for that place.’ That’s probably one of the best-known lines in The Prelude, though he has another phrase about Cambridge which is equally apt. Describing his last two years and his feeling of detachment, he says he decided to live like a ‘lodger in that house of Letters’.

  It could be argued that Wordsworth was the failure at Cambridge—rather than Cambridge failing him, which is how it is often described. There is not one contemporary account of him at Cambridge by any of his fellow-students, which is surprising, considering how people usually manage to dig up and produce yellowing memories of people, once they are famous. He didn’t impress anyone sufficiently at the time for them to rush to their notebooks or diaries and jot down a few impressions. The only known reference is by an anonymous contemporary some three years later, who remembered Wordsworth as that chap who went on and on about the beauties of the Lake District.

  He was a failure at Cambridge, in the sense of not passing the right examination. Even as a poet, he did very little, except for starting An Evening Walk, most of which he wrote in the holidays at Hawkshead. Cambridge was very much a fallow time. He might have felt secretly that he was a Chosen Son, but nobody else seems to have noticed. It has been suggested that he was discriminated against for his country ways and bucolic dress and manners, and that this could be one reason why he disliked Cambridge so much and why he was driven in upon himself. But there’s not much evidence for this and in The Prelude he does try to tell the truth, as he remembers it. We have to believe, therefore, his evidence which points to him choosing to turn Cambridge down. He tested it and found it wanting. In any case, quite apart from Wordsworth’s own reminiscences, there is overwhelming evidence of the low state of almost everything at Cambridge at that time. His wasn’t an isolated experience. Wordsworth’s often quoted remark about being in the wrong place at the wrong time is, with hindsight, peculiarly true. If he had gone to Cambridge a couple of years later, this might have made all the difference. But he was there at the nadir of eighteenth-century thinking and eighteenth-century dissipation. The ruling cliques, though corrupt and tottering, were still in control.

  It was while Wordsworth was at Cambridge, after his second year, that the French Revolution broke out. On the actual day the Bastille was stormed, 14 July 1789, it looks as if he was on his way to Norfolk, to see Dorothy at his uncle’s parsonage.

  Rousseau’s writings had a great effect on the whole of Europe, not just on France. Dissidents, in religion and in politics, had already started pressing independently for reform. Wordsworth, being a rebel at heart, judging from his boyhood and his Cambridge days, would have been attracted to any student radical movement or radical teachers, if he’d met any. Nothing and no-one of that sort appear to have come his way at Cambridge. They were there, in a minor form, but the heady days were to come a year or so later. As far as he was concerned, he was just passing through.

&n
bsp; But Cambridge did have one good effect, albeit a negative one, on Wordsworth. It showed him what he wasn’t. It let him see he didn’t want to be a lawyer or a cleric, though it remained to be seen what form his dedicated spirit would take. It was a great revelation to him, being exposed to the world of Cambridge—a veritable culture shock for a young innocent from the hills to go amongst the wicked and the dissolute, so different from the world of nature. He was now able to see the value of Hawkshead. By going away, he was beginning to arrive.

  CAMBRIDGE

  Some lines from Book 3 of The Prelude about his early impressions of Cambridge.

  Strange transformation for a Mountain Youth,

  A northern Villager. As if by word

  Of Magic or some Fairy’s power at once

  Behold me rich in monies, and attir’d

  In splendid clothes, with hose of silk and hair

  Glittering like rimy trees when frost is keen,

  My Lordly Dressing-gown I pass it by,

  With other signs of manhood which supplied

  The lack of beard. The weeks went roundly on,

  With invitations, suppers, wine and fruit,

  Smooth housekeeping within, and all without

  Liberal and suiting Gentleman’s array!

  We saunter’d, play’d, we rioted, we talked

  Unprofitable talk at morning hours.

  Such was the tenor of the opening act

  In this new life. Imagination slept.

  Some fears

  About my future worldly maintainance,