William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  He eventually got going again, and met William Calvert back on the Calvert family farm, Windy Browe, near Keswick, on the slopes of Skiddaw, where Calvert was staying with his brother Raisley. William also visited a few other old friends, such as the Speddings of Armthwaite (the family of another old schoolfellow, who also had charming sisters), and visited his Wordsworth relations down the coast at Whitehaven. It wasn’t until February that William finally managed to get across to Halifax and have his long-awaited secret reunion with Dorothy.

  ‘Oh my dear sister, dear sister, with what transports of delight shall I again meet you, with what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.’ These had been William’s pretty words, in a letter to Dorothy some eight months earlier, when the secret meeting was first planned, but of course the Calvert trip had intervened. There may have been other obstacles which kept them apart, such as that possible trip to France. In a letter sent after his arrival in Halifax to a friend in London, he wrote, ‘I have been doing nothing and still continue to do nothing; what is to become of me I do not know.’ There is no doubt, however, that his feelings for Dorothy were sincere and that after all the delays and procrastinations he did rush to her arms, when at last they did meet again.

  William and Dorothy spent about six weeks with their relations and friends in Halifax and then, in the spring of 1794, they ran away together. That might seem rather an emotive phrase, considering they were siblings, and perhaps even an unnecessary one, as they were both adults; but there is a hint of an elopement. Dorothy did have obligations to her Uncle William who had taken her in and saved her from her awful life in Penrith. Her role as an unmarried, impecunious member of a large family was to stay at home and help those relations, such as her clerical uncle, who had children or large houses or both. Her uncles were her guardians and she was beholden to them for help and money, till the Lowther debts were settled. She had had a little windfall on the death of her grandmother, and her big brother Richard, the only brother so far with a proper career, was kind and sent her occasional presents. Young John was doing well at sea, sailing round the world on various ships, but he’d still only risen to fifth mate. She had to heed her uncles, who certainly didn’t want her running around with a ne’er-do-well like her brother William.

  Nonetheless, William and Dorothy went off, on foot, heading for the Lake District. In those days, it was considered an extraordinary sight for a young lady to be seen walking anywhere. ‘I walked with my brother at my side, from Kendal to Grasmere, eighteen miles, and afterwards from Grasmere to Keswick, fifteen miles, through the most delightful country that ever was seen.’ Unlike William, Dorothy had never lived in the Lakes, having spent her adolescence in Penrith, Halifax and then Norfolk. They were aiming, once they got to Keswick, for the Calverts’ farm, which had been put at their disposal. They spent an idyllic two months in and around the Lakes, with endless walks and visits to old friends of William’s, like the Speddings. Dorothy found the Spedding daughters absolutely charming. ‘They have read much and are amiable and engaging in their manners. We have been staying there three nights and should have stayed longer if Mrs Spedding had not been going from home.’ It wouldn’t of course have been proper in those days for young men to be in the same house overnight with unattended young ladies, even if they were over twenty-one.

  While Dorothy and William were in their Keswick retreat, staying at the Calvert farm, one of her aunts, Mrs Crackenthorpe, the wife of the disagreeable Uncle Kit, wrote what must have been a pretty strong letter of censure, judging by Dorothy’s reply:

  I am much obliged to you for your frankness with which you have expressed your sentiments upon my conduct and am at the same time extremely sorry that you should think it so severely to be condemned. In answer to your suggestion that I may be supposed to be in an exposed situation, I affirm that I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection, and besides I am convinced that there is no place in the world in which a good and virtuous young woman would be more likely to continue good and virtuous than under the roof of these worthy uncorrupted people.

  The Calverts and their tenant farmers were indeed good and worthy people; but the Calverts themselves weren’t there, having left William and Dorothy, with their own quarters, to fend for themselves.

  ‘I am now twenty-two years of age,’ continued Dorothy, ‘and such has been the circumstances of my life that I may be said to have enjoyed his company only for a very few months. An opportunity now presents itself of obtaining this satisfaction, an opportunity which I could not see pass from me without unbearable pain.’

  It was during their stay at Windy Browe that Dorothy began copying out ‘Salisbury Plain’ for William—the first time she’d acted as his secretary and copyist, a job she eventually turned into a lifetime’s occupation.

  They left Windy Browe after about a month and went down the coast to see their Whitehaven relations, paying a visit to their old Cockermouth home on the way. ‘All was in ruin, the terrace walk buried and choked up with the old privet hedge which had formerly been so beautiful—the same hedge where the sparrows used to build their nests.’ How typical of that beastly Lord Lonsdale to have let the house become empty and overgrown, almost as another slight to the Wordsworth family.

  William still hadn’t found any employment, though he was again in correspondence with his London friend about a possible new magazine. Their money, such as it was, eventually ran out. Dorothy was forced to return to living with relations once again, this time near Barrow, while William went back to the Calvert house, where young Raisley Calvert was seriously ill and needed a companion.

  Raisley, though not of a literary inclination himself, had been most affected to learn from William of his struggles and of his attempts to write poetry. He’d obviously heard many times about the awful Lowthers and about how William was penniless and would never be able to dedicate his life to poetry in the way he wanted. To all intents and purposes William had so far been something of a failure. Nevertheless, Raisley saw in William a spark of genius, or at least a spark of something out of the ordinary—enough for him to promise William that he would share his income with him. Few people until this time had seen such a spark in William, apart from Dorothy, and all she got for her devotion was a severe ticking-off from her relations.

  But Raisley Calvert had promised more than to share his income with William. He vowed to leave him a legacy of £600: enough for him to live on without having to follow a profession. No wonder William hurried back when he heard he was ill.

  It was thought that after a holiday abroad, with William as his companion, Raisley would soon recover. This plan greatly appealed to William. Lisbon was chosen, well away from all the awful troubles in France. William had never visited Portugal, a country which was also very popular with English people at the time, and he relished the prospect of being Raisley’s paid companion on such an exotic tour. They set off from Keswick in October 1794, but had only got as far as Penrith, not exactly a glamorous town in William’s eyes, when they had to turn back because of Raisley’s health. For the next three months, William was stuck at Keswick, morally obliged to nurse Raisley.

  William looked after Raisley, who had just turned twenty-one, with care and attention, but in his letters to his London friends he betrays signs of definite irritation. He obviously felt trapped. He couldn’t leave Raisley, his benefactor-to-be, not when he was so needed, but at the same time, Raisley had never been an intimate friend. It was his first: chance for years, since leaving Cambridge, of having enough money to be able to do what he really wanted. At least he now knew what he wanted, to write poetry and be with Dorothy, but there seemed little: chance of achieving it, without some amazing piece of luck, such as Raisley Calvert dying … His thoughts and motives must have been very mixed and very morbid.

  William found himself i
n something of a panic when he discovered that, if and when the money was left to him, he might have it immediately taken away from him. His Uncle Richard in Whitehaven, one of his two legal guardians, had just died, and his uncle’s children claimed that William owed them £460, the money their father had advanced to him at Cambridge. It was a topic which was to split the family for years, and William could clearly see the terrible possibilities. While he was impoverished, they would simply have to wait. But if he came into £600 from Raisley, they could legally claim almost all of it for themselves at once.

  William wrote desperate letters to his brother Richard, who had now assumed responsibility for handling the Wordsworth family affairs. He asked Richard if he would make a bond to pay the debt of £460 for him, out of his own money, so that when William received Raisley’s £600, he could have all of it to live on and be free. One of these years, when he had more money, he promised he would pay Richard back. It was a large favour to ask his brother—a shadowy figure in life, except when it came to financial matters—but Richard handsomely agreed.

  Then there was a further panic when Raisley Calvert, now on his death-bed, became fed up with his local family solicitor and decided to write out a new will by himself. Raisley talked of increasing his promised legacy from £600 to £900, which must have pleased William, but it could all go wrong, right at the last moment, if Raisley, so William wrote in great agitation to his brother, made his new will in an irregular manner: ‘What I have further to say is to ask whether it would not be proper for you if possible to come down immediately so as to see that the will is executed according to form. At all events no time is to be lost as he is so much reduced as to make it probable he cannot be on earth long.’

  The situation had now become macabre, with William hovering in a panic around the dying youth, but eventually Raisley managed somehow to make his will to William’s satisfaction, and William was able to tell his brother there was no need after all to come up from London. Raisley died in January 1795, and the sum of £900 was left ‘to my friend William Wordsworth’. It took some time for the money to come through, and it did so in dribs and drabs, but William’s immediate financial future was now assured.

  It was a rather eerie episode, which, if examined closely, doesn’t show William in all that wonderful a light. He didn’t scheme or in any way precipitate the legacy, but he made sure that matters worked out to his advantage. ‘I had had but little connection,’ he admitted later about his relationship with Raisley, ‘and the act was done entirely from a confidence on his part that I had powers and attainments which might be of use to mankind.’

  There’s another interesting sidelight on William’s feelings and opinions at that time, as revealed in his letters to London, stuck as he was up in Keswick, wondering how he’d got himself into such a position, sitting by the death-bed of someone he hardly knew:

  I begin to wish much to be in town; cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions, besides I have not even much of their conversation as I am so much with my sick friend and he cannot bear the fatigue of being read to. Nothing indeed but a sense of duty could detain me here under the present circumstance. This is a country for poetry it is true, but the muse is not to be won but by the sacrifice of time, and time I have not to spare.

  He was a young, impatient man, it is true, caught in an emotional situation, but who would have thought you could catch William Wordsworth ever criticizing the Lakes? But, when life is in a state of flux, you can float many ways and all ways, and display feelings and inclinations which later you might not care or be able to remember.

  William didn’t immediately rush to Dorothy to set up their dream cottage somewhere, as one might have imagined, now that he had some money. Instead, he went straight back to London, where another stroke of good luck soon befell him, though at first he was caught up again with his old radical friends, which brought him only more worries and confusions. He became a disciple at this period of William Godwin, the political philosopher whose work and books he had admired since his return from France. He sat at his feet for several months, talking with him into the night with other young Cambridge graduates. Godwin’s complicated philosophy of reason appealed to him. He believed, for example, that good people could sin, could do wrong, yet still be good. This notion attracted William, thinking perhaps of Annette or of the tortuous thoughts he must have had by Raisley’s bedside. Godwin was also anti-marriage, which must have sounded attractive, though in 1797 Godwin himself got married, to Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer and early feminist. (Their daughter Mary was the future wife of Shelley and the author of Frankenstein.) Much has been made of the many influences Godwin had over William during these few months, but once a chance appeared to get away, William took it immediately and was gone.

  It came through his friendship with an old Cambridge contemporary, Basil Montagu, with whom William went to live on his return to London. Montagu was the natural son of the Earl of Sandwich and his mistress, Martha Ray, a singer who’d been shot dead some years earlier outside Covent Garden Theatre by a former lover, a vicar from Norfolk. It was a great scandal of the time—of any time—and James Boswell is said to have accompanied the vicar in the mourning coach on his way to his execution at Tyburn.

  Basil Montagu was studying for the bar, but was also taking in pupils to pay his way as his wife had died and he was trying to combine work with bringing up his two-year-old son, also called Basil. He had been a great and good friend of William’s for many years, though a slightly eccentric, disorganized, impulsive one. He was constantly hard up, and William gave him £300 of his Raisley Calvert legacy in a lump sum, in return for an annuity which Montagu promised to pay him at ten per cent. It sounds a foolhardy thing to have done, but William was looking for some way to invest his money and give himself a regular income.

  Through Montagu, William got to know two of his pupils, the Pinney boys, who, like young Raisley Calvert, were very impressed by William’s spark of originality and his efforts as a struggling poet. They offered William the use of their country home, Racedown Lodge in Dorset, for him and his sister to live in rent-free. Their family home was a big house in Bristol where their father lived, a prosperous sugar merchant, with plantations in the West Indies.

  Dorothy was absolutely thrilled when she heard that William was being offered a country cottage—and wanted her to join him. She had gone to visit her old friend Mary Hutchinson and her family in Durham, and had then moved back to the Halifax relations. She never returned to her clerical uncle and his family in Norfolk. Perhaps he’d washed his hands of her, as well as of William.

  At last, her long-held dream was about to come true. Not only had they got a rent-free cottage, even if only for a short time, but they had also two sources of income. Basil Montagu was arranging for his young son to go with William and Dorothy to Racedown. For looking after him, he was going to pay them £50 a year. They were also going to have another child in their care, a natural daughter of one of their Myers cousins—a love child, as they called them in those days.

  With the money paid them to look after the two children, plus the income from Calvert’s legacy, Dorothy calculated that they would have about £170 a year. To William and his sister this seemed a fortune. Their luck had turned. The years of wandering and indecision, and of being dependent on the ill grace of others, seemed over. Dorothy could already see the parlour, the cosy fire. Together, at last.

  THE LONDON VICAR

  From Book 7 of The Prelude, Residence in London.

  These are grave follies: other public Shows

  The capital City teems with, of a kind

  More light, and where but in the holy Church?

  There have I seen a comely Bachelor,

  Fresh from a toilette of two hours, ascend

  The Pulpit, with seraphic glance look up,

  And, in a tone elaborately low

  Beginning, lead his voice through many a maze,
r />   A minuet course, and winding up his mouth,

  From time to time into an orifice

  Most delicate, a lurking eyelet, small

  And only not invisible, again

  Open it out, diffusing thence a smile

  Of rapt irradiation exquisite.

  This pretty Shepherd, pride of all the Plains,

  Leads up and down his captivated Flock.

  6

  West Country

  1795–1798

  THERE was in the city of Bristol in 1795 a group of young gentlemen, educated young gentlemen, clever and ambitious and very radical young gentlemen, who had decided that England was reactionary and corrupt, and, as there seemed no likelihood of reform, let alone revolution, they were going to emigrate and found their own Utopian community on the banks of the River Susquehanna in America. They’d never been there, nor were they quite sure where the Susquehanna flowed, but they liked the mellifluous sound of its name. The scheme was called Pantisocracy. ‘The equal government of all’ was their paraphrase of the title. Twelve young gentlemen, with twelve young ladies, would set up an agricultural commune where everyone was equal. Each man would have to labour for only three hours a day. According to their reading of the latest economic theories, by Adam Smith, who maintained that only one in twenty men was productive anyway, this would be sufficient to support the whole community. Everyone could hold his own religious and political beliefs and all children of the community would be educated together. They hadn’t quite decided on whether marriages could be dissolved at will by any one partner, but they were working on it. The sum of £125 each, they calculated, would be enough to get a boat, sail out of Bristol and start their brave new life together.

  It is hard not to smile at the idealism of it all, though, if you too happen to be young and idealistic and radical, you perhaps won’t smile but think it perfectly wonderful—the sort of thing you might at this very moment be looking for. Two hundred years later, such notions still attract and similar communities, with a few modern refinements, are still being set up. The leaders of the Pantisocratic scheme were two struggling young poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged twenty-three, and Robert Southey, aged twenty-one. In their lives and hard times and rebellious attitudes, they were very similar to each other—and to another struggling young poet who, that very summer, was making plans to travel to the West Country to await his sister.