William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  He’d also fallen passionately in love, a fact which he doesn’t mention in The Prelude, for all that it is supposed to be an autobiographical poem. Her name was Annette Vallon and he first met her in Orleans, where she was staying at the time with her brother. They were probably the nearby ‘family’ William had been visiting. She gave him French lessons—free, it would appear—and the lessons led on to love-making. She was very soon pregnant.

  It must have been a most dramatic and exciting courtship, a sudden and intense physical passion, each of them swept off their feet, carried away blindly, ignoring all the dangers and problems surrounding such a relationship. It is hard to fit it in with the character of Wordsworth as the world at large later knew him. It is almost as difficult to reconcile it with the facts of his life recounted so far. We know he had been a rebel—wayward, headstrong and disobedient to his guardians, refusing to conform, a drifter and a procrastinator, irresponsible even—but he was supposedly a dedicated spirit, one who had so far avoided the sins of the flesh, as far as we know. What came over him?

  Annette was from a respectable, middle-class family and came from Blois, not far from Orleans. Her father, now dead, had been a surgeon in Blois, as had his father and grandfather before him. Surgeons in those days didn’t have quite the esteem they enjoy today, having not so long before been little more than clever barbers; but they were of some social standing nonetheless. Annette’s mother had remarried, so perhaps Annette had rather moved away and was no longer completely under parental control. However, like the rest of her family, she was a devout Catholic and a strong royalist. She was twenty-five, four years older than William, so there’s a temptation—though absolutely no evidence—to suppose she might have been the dominant partner, the woman of the world who was amused by this young, serious but passionate young foreigner who chanced to walk into her life. He also happened to be a penniless foreigner, with no job, no training or prospects, a non-Catholic, an anti-royalist and a strong republican. What, then, was she doing? It could only have been passion.

  Annette moved back to her home in Blois, and William followed her. It’s not known what her family thought, but there’s a hint of secret meetings, so no doubt they were not best pleased.

  On 19 May 1792, when Annette must have been pregnant for about a couple of months, William wrote from Blois to a friend in England, saying he still intended to come home in the winter and take holy orders. He wished he could defer it, but it wasn’t in his power, as he’d made a promise to his uncle. In September, still at Blois, with Annette now heavily pregnant, he wrote to his brother Richard in London, asking for a further £20 to be sent out to him urgently. In the same letter, he repeats his intention to return in the winter, saying he’ll probably stay with Richard for a few weeks in London while he sees about the publication of his Descriptive Sketches, which he’d been completing while in France. He expected to be back in October. In neither letter is his connection with Annette mentioned, nor the slightest hint of it given.

  Not long afterwards, William and Annette both returned to Orleans. Perhaps Annette’s family had refused to shelter her any more, now the birth was imminent. William, as he’d planned, left Orleans in October. This would seem a callous thing to do, leaving the mother-to-be on her own, but it was now dangerous to be an Englishman in France and he needed to go home to England and get some money, so he said. But he promised to return to Annette and the baby. He had no intention of abandoning them. He left someone with legal powers to register the birth, and his name was entered on the baptismal certificate as father. Annette’s child—a girl, Caroline—was born on 15 December 1792.

  But William did not go straight home. For about a month, at least, he was lingering in Paris, and was possibly still there at the time of the birth, despite having no money and being in danger. It was obviously a most exciting time to be in Paris, and no doubt it proved hard for a young idealist to drag himself away, even with personal commitments and responsibilities elsewhere. The King had been deposed after the mob had stormed the Tuileries in August and he was now locked up, for his own safety. Some allied forces were marching into France threatening to put down the Revolution. In reply, the Commune, led by Danton, Marat and Robespierre, had encouraged the September Massacre. Over three thousand royalist sympathizers had been taker out of prison and publicly murdered. William arrived just a few weeks after the massacre, and could feel and smell the blood and the bodies still in the street. He was horrified and frightened, but still he didn’t leave. He watched and heard the reaction against Robespierre, in the streets and in the newspapers, as some sections blamed him and the Jacobins for the excesses. William, like many of the idealists, felt more sympathy with the Girondists: the more moderate, more peaceful of the Revolutionary groups. But in November, Robespierre routed his critics, denied responsibility for the September Massacre, and went on to take charge of the Revolution—until his own head rolled off the guillotine. It was, indeed, a dramatic time. No student of the human race would want to have missed it.

  William eventually arrived back in England by late December 1792, and immediately confessed all to his sister Dorothy. He did intend to return to Annette, but very soon war between England and France officially broke out and it was then not possible for him to go back to Orleans. He definitely planned to marry Annette, judging by a series of very touching love-letters, as well as many letters to Dorothy, which Annette wrote, and which were discovered earlier this century. Dorothy, the perfect sister, immediately understood what had happened, blamed no-one, and from then on addressed Annette as her own sister. William, never a great letter-writer, let Dorothy do most of the corresponding, even though, in theory, he could now speak French, whereas Dorothy, who’d never been abroad or been educated, had to teach herself.

  In Wordsworth’s lifetime, the public never knew about the Annette affair and his French daughter, though he told his immediate family and closest friends. After his death, the official biography, written by his nephew, made no reference to the affair and it was all hushed up. (The nephew, who knew the truth, simply says he was ‘young, impetuous, encompassed with strong temptations’). The story only emerged in the 1920s after an American scholar (Harper) and a French one (Legouis) had done some brilliant detective work and tracked down letters from Annette, still lying unread, 130 years later, in local departmental archives in the Loire district. At the time the letters were written, England had been an alien power, at war with France, and so they had never been delivered. Imagine the scandal! Imagine the shock to Wordsworth scholars, as they all rushed to read the love-letters and to reassess their theories about who or what had been the great influences in the poet’s life.

  The letters are utterly charming. Annette never threatens or blackmails William, morally or financially. Whatever else William was at the time, he prided himself on being a young man of principles. If Annette had been wicked and scheming in the first place—as some people believed when the news first came out, unable to reconcile the facts with the later, Victorian image of Wordsworth as the stern man of God—then surely she would have tried to force him to marry her before the birth of the child. She might well have managed it, if that had been her wish. It is interesting to wonder why he didn’t marry her in Orleans, before the war had started. What held him back, in that first mad passion, when nothing else in his life seemed to matter? His staying on in Paris, while she was about to give birth, is also mysterious, since he was supposed to be going home for money. However, when he left her, Annette was convinced that they would soon be together again, as man and wife. After he’d arrived in London, she wrote to him:

  My distress would be lessened were we married. Yet I regard it as almost impossible that you should risk yourself. You might be taken prisoner. But where do my wishes lead me?

  I speak as though the instant of my happiness were at hand. Write and tell me what you think and do your very utmost to hasten your daughter’s happiness and mine, but only if there is not the slightest ris
k to be run. I think the war will not last long … but find some way by which we can write to each other in case the correspondence between the two kingdoms were stopped.

  In a letter to Dorothy, Annette sympathized with the problems of telling the uncles and said she did not want William to be unhappy. But her biggest concern was for Caroline’s happiness. She even considered it would be enough if only William could come across to France for a short while, marry her and make Caroline legitimate, thereby taking away the shame which she and her family feared Caroline would have to bear for ever.

  William was in great distress, contorted with guilt and worry, confused by his emotions, caught up in events which were now out of his control. The following summer he spent about a month on the Isle of Wight, for no apparent reason, just sitting around, watching the English fleet preparing to fight the French. Did he half hope or half try to get on a boat bound for France? Annette’s letters had certainly become very emotional:

  Often when I am alone in my room with his [William’s] letters I dream he is going to walk in. I stand ready to throw myself into his arms and say to him: ‘Come my love, come and dry these tears which have long been flowing for you, let us fly and see Caroline, your child and your likeness; behold your wife, sorrow has altered her much; do you know her? Yes! by the emotion which your heart must share with hers. If her features are altered, if her pallor makes it impossible for you to know her, her heart is unchanged’ Ah, my dear sister, such is my habitual state of mind. But waking from my delusion as from a dream, I do not see him, my child’s father; he is very far from me. These transports occur again and again and throw me into a state of dejection.…

  But the war went on, and William could do nothing; he learnt to live with the situation and waited for the war to end. Although he put no reference to Annette in The Prelude, in the middle of the French section there is a long and extremely tedious story about a blighted love affair between a nobly born French boy and a humble local girl. It appears to be a rather pointless, sudden interlude, though Wordsworth has inserted a few similarly sudden interludes elsewhere in The Prelude, dragging in stories and incidents, out of context, from other periods of his life.

  Until the Annette story was revealed, the Wordsworth scholars, while admitting that this was a boring interlude, decided it was meant to be a political metaphor, illustrating one of the iniquities of the ancien regime in France, since it showed a noble family being oppressive and dogmatic. But once they knew about Annette, they suddenly decided it was obviously meant to be a metaphor for William’s own love affair! It makes one wary of all deductions based on a handful of letters or facts, when we never know what has not survived. It also shows how easy it can be to find things, once you’ve decided what it is you’re trying to find. However, and nonetheless and notwithstanding, the saga in The Prelude of Vaudracour and Julia, as told in Wordsworth’s words, does bear some striking relationships with the poet’s love affair such as it was eventually revealed to have been. The differences between the two lovers, the obstacles put in the way of their marriage, and then the birth of Julia’s baby, are very similar to the facts of William’s and Annette’s affair. The most revealing lines are the early ones about their passion:

  He beheld

  A vision, and he loved the thing he saw.

  Arabian Fiction never filled the world

  With half the wonders that were wrought for him.

  We know, because Wordsworth has told us earlier in the poem, that as a boy he adored reading The Arabian Nights: the first book to stir his imagination. So, that could be a clue. He later describes the girl’s fears in words which have echoes of Annette’s own letters, though, admittedly, you would never think of the connection, unless you’d just read Annette’s letters:

  A thousand thousand fears and hopes Stirred in her mind; thoughts waking, thoughts of sleep Entangled in each other.

  The end of the story is all highly dramatic. The nobleman locks up his son—and no doubt Wordsworth felt he too was in a prison, being locked in England—but then the son kills a servant while trying to escape. He has to agree to give up all thoughts of marriage, to appease his father, and is then allowed out. He sees Julia briefly again, but she goes into a convent and he goes off with the child, living on his own in a forest, talking to no-one, wasting his days, becoming an imbecile.

  We will probably never know how serious William was about marrying Annette, though she certainly wrote like a woman who knew that her lover planned to marry her. It had been a moment of ecstasy and grand passion, but it all ended in sadness, a harrowing experience for both of them, one that clouded his thoughts and life for many, many years.

  The bare facts can make him appear rather callous, but doubtless Annette urged him to leave her, agreeing that he should go back to England to get some money, wait for the Lowther case to be settled, and then return when it was safe.

  It was a sudden thing, done in the heat of passion. William hadn’t been completely unaware of girls till then, as Dorothy’s barbed remark about the three Jones sisters indicates, but it doesn’t look as if he had had any sexual experience. He’d been appalled by the sight of prostitutes and by the dissolute life of the wild bucks at Cambridge. There were no real ladies at Cambridge for the young men: it was either women of the street or nothing. William surely wouldn’t have fallen in that way. But in France—a headstrong, rebellious young man, passionate and excited about everything that was happening to him, fresh from Cambridge, where morals had been extremely lax—he was a long way from home and far from normal conventions and restraints. And he did love Annette. There’s no doubt about that. But, oh, the remorse and moral turpitude he must now have experienced. Until then, he had been sinned against rather than sinning. The Lowthers, his hateful Penrith relations, the corrupt and distasteful Cambridge system—with them all, he felt he was in the right. Now, in his darker moments, he felt he had done wrong.

  THE PRELUDE

  From The Prelude, Book 10, the end of his residence in France.

  In this frame of mind,

  Reluctantly to England I return’d,

  Compelled by nothing less than absolute want

  Of funds for my support, else, well assured

  That I both was and must be of small worth,

  No better than an alien in the Land,

  I doubtless should have made a common cause

  With some who perish’d, haply perish’d, too,

  A poor mistaken and bewilder’d offering,

  Should to the breast of Nature have gone back

  With all my resolutions, all my hopes,

  A Poet only to myself, to Men

  Useless, and even, beloved Friend! a soul

  To thee unknown.

  5

  Mainly London

  1793–1795

  WORDSWORTH loved London, but he also hated London. Even when he loved it, he hated himself for loving it. He knew he could never really live there, but its loveliness and its hatefulness always fascinated him. It is an archetypal provincial reaction, one that is still with us, but Wordsworth at least put his impressions on paper. His descriptions of wandering round London, observing street life, the theatres, the shows, the public spectacles, are some of the finest passages of observation in The Prelude. Poets of the day, when they described London, saw only its grandeur. Wordsworth, like Dickens later on, saw only too clearly its seamy side as well.

  As a young boy in Hawkshead, he’d been mesmerized by the idea of London, like most country folk. He once fell eagerly upon a crippled boy at his school who had been on a visit to London, pumping him for information, but unfortunately the boy couldn’t remember anything. He didn’t even look different. Wordsworth was most disappointed. His own images of London consisted of processions, the Royal Palace, dukes, kings, Dick Whittington and the notion that next-door neighbours in the same street don’t know each other’s names. Some images never change.

  The reality of the crowds, the squalor, the freaks, the c
heap entertainment, the maimed and the beggars appalled him when he eventually saw them, but even so, the city at night, when the great tide of human life stood still, had almost a hypnotizing effect on him. He clearly saw the follies of the public men, the postures of the politicians, yet in the vast receptacle of London, ‘living amid the same perpetual flow of trivial objects, melted and reduced to one identity’, he managed to feel the Spirit of Nature come upon him.

  London drew from Wordsworth, in The Prelude, one of his few pieces of humorous—well, faintly satirical, or perhaps gently teasing—writing. It was about a vicar in a fashionable church who had a particularly fruity accent, the sort of contorted, affected voice which is still common in fashionable London churches.

  However, William didn’t have so much time for standing around listening and staring as he’d had on his previous visit. He was now fired with revolutionary fervour, and with a desire to get his two poems published: Descriptive Sketches, which he’d finished in Orleans and which contained a lot of pro-revolutionary writing, and his Lakeland landscape poem, An Evening Walk. These two poems, his first published volumes, appeared on 29 January 1793. They seem to have been rather rushed through the press, considering he’d only been back in London a little over a month, but perhaps he knew beforehand that he had an interested publisher and this was probably one of the reasons he had given Annette for having to come back to London, hoping to get some money from his poems and so help her and the baby. The publisher, Joseph Johnson, had radical leanings and introduced Wordsworth to others of the same inclination.