William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  His marriage, alas, was finally collapsing. Yet he loved his children. Two others were born after he moved to Greta Hall: Derwent in 1800 (named after the river) and Sara in 1802. He got it into his head that he was passionately in love with Sarah Hutchinson, and she, for a time, seems to have returned some of his affection, though one has to presume, for want of any evidence, that the affair was completely chaste. One of her sisters, Joanna, was very disappointed when she met Coleridge, having been given a glowing description of him by Sarah. She much preferred William, finding him much more ‘canny a man’, even if he wasn’t handsome.

  Sara Coleridge usually comes out of all this very badly. The Wordsworths, especially Dorothy, tended to give her a bad press, agreeing with Coleridge’s opinion of her as a shrew and a complainer, interested only in her domestic life and her babies, and not interested in him, his writing or his friends. (Incidentally, to avoid confusion, I’ve spelt Sarah Hutchinson throughout this book with an ‘h’, which is how the name appeared on her gravestone, though it was often spelt Sara as well.)

  ‘She would have made a very good wife to many another man, but for Coleridge!!,’ so Dorothy wrote about Sara Coleridge after she and William had been to stay with the Coleridges at Greta Hall. ‘Her radical fault is want of sensibility and what can such a woman be to Coleridge. She is an excellent nurse to her sucking children—I mean to the best of her skill, for she employs her time often foolishly enough about them. Derwent is a sweet lovely Fatty—she suckles him entirely—he has no other food. She is sure to be a sad fiddle faddler.’ Almost every remark about Mrs Coleridge in Dorothy’s letters is either bitchy or critical; at one point she calls her ‘the lightest weakest silliest woman’. Considering Dorothy hadn’t experienced childbirth herself, she had rather set herself up as an expert on child-rearing. Dorothy was always forthright in her private letters, but rarely nasty and unfair, so perhaps Mrs Coleridge did deserve some of the blame for the collapse of the marriage. But, though she did seem unable to nurse Coleridge through his mental and physical troubles, imagined or otherwise, she was by no means stupid or uneducated. Coleridge and Southey, after all, wouldn’t have chosen completely unsuitable partners for their Susquehanna enterprise. As her children grew up, Sara Coleridge proved an excellent mother, teaching them French and mathematics and providing some of the intellectual stimulus which Coleridge would have given them, had he stayed at home.

  Mrs Coleridge has to be pitied slightly—left behind while they were all in Germany, then dragged up to the Lakes, away from her home area and friends, with no personal desire to follow the Wordsworths, whose life style, nocturnal wanderings, shabby clothes, uncivilized habits, lack of gentility and unpunctuality she disapproved of. When she got to the Lakes, she had babies to suckle and could not suddenly be available for three-day hikes over the mountains. It was all right for Dorothy. She could up and go when asked.

  Coleridge was planning a great philosophical book, while being employed, ostensibly, as a journalist. He’d managed to get a retainer of sorts from the Morning Post, writing reviews, articles and poetry, though William often helped him, contributing some anonymous verse when Coleridge fell behind with his commitments. Daniel Stuart, editor of the Morning Post, was a personal friend of both William and Coleridge, and William might have made a little money that way, if he’d wanted to. Dorothy was against William doing any such journalism, and even fretted when William started ‘wasting his mind in the magazines’. Coleridge was an excellent journalist, able to turn his hand to most sorts of article, and was in demand as a ‘writer-up’ of parliamentary debates. It was a legal rule of the day that speeches could not be reported verbatim, but it was Samuel Johnson who had perfected a system of rewriting the main points of a speech in new words, doing it so elegantly that the speakers themselves were pleased to acknowledge them as their own.

  Coleridge was an expert at this and could produce a Pitt speech often better than Pitt himself. He tended to do this sort of journalism in the winter, when he usually spent a few months in London, away from the worst of the Lakeland weather, but he was a little ashamed of his facility. His old West Country friend Poole was very disapproving. Being a clever journalist had no more social standing then than it has today—though it could pay well, for the right people.

  Coleridge decided to try to persuade Southey to follow him to the Lakes, an arrangement which he thought would help with his own family commitments. They’d patched up their quarrel and were now friends again. Southey had abandoned his idea of reading for the bar and getting a steady job, and he too was now concentrating full-time on being a writer. Coleridge wrote glowing letters and reports of the marvellous life they were all having in Keswick: the terrific views from the windows, the marvellous walks. He even got Southey to go off on a three-day exploratory hike across Skiddaw and round the northern fells, but Southey gave in after the first night, when they’d only reached Caldbeck. However, he eventually moved into Greta Hall with his family in 1803, soon finding that he was also expected to be responsible for Coleridge’s family, as Coleridge wandered off to be with his real friends.

  Coleridge’s devotion to William’s genius didn’t waver, but it began to have a negative effect on his own poetic ambitions. ‘I abandon poetry altogether,’ he eventually wrote to a friend. ‘I leave the higher and deeper kinds to Wordsworth, the delightful, popular and simply dignified to Southey, and reserve for myself the honourable attempt to make others feel and understand their writings, and they deserve to be felt.’

  It was a mark of true friendship and devotion, to subordinate his own aspiration to a friend’s. In the long run, he did more than anyone else to give Wordsworth the reputation he has today, forcing people to think carefully about his poems, leading them to a proper understanding, defending him, in books and articles, letters and conversations, against the mockers and the ridiculers. But Coleridge’s immediate help took a practical form. He threw himself into the task of helping Wordsworth see through the press a new edition of Lyrical Ballads.

  Cottle had miscalculated, as publishers so often do. He’d been too quick to sell off the bulk of the first edition of five hundred copies of Lyrical Ballads as remainders—and at a loss. The first three reviews were so bad that they would have put off any likely buyers. But about a year after publication, in the summer and autumn of 1799, two more reviews suddenly appeared, both of them very long and very fulsome, talking of the poet’s ‘genius and originality … and many excellences’. The books had also been advertised by the new distributor; sales started to jump and the whole stock was quickly sold.

  The first of these good reviews, in the British Critic, appears to have been written by one of William’s friends, but whatever the personal background, there had been a slight public unease at the viciousness of the early reviews—although being vicious was part of the style of the times—and many people thought the reviewers had gone too far, especially when it was known that Southey had a personal grudge against Coleridge. Even Southey himself had begun to regret being so harsh.

  The delayed success proved what Dorothy had thought all along. ‘The first volume sold so much better than we expected and was liked by a much greater number of people; not that we had ever much doubt of its finally making its way; but we knew that poems so different from what have in general become popular immediately after publication, were not likely to be admired all at once.’

  Longmans came to William and offered him £80 for a new two-volume edition of Lyrical Ballads. They planned to reprint seven hundred and fifty copies of the first edition and a thousand copies of a second volume (which would contain new poems), bringing them out as companion volumes, although the second volume could be bought separately. It was a handsome offer, the best William had received so far, and he was hard at work throughout 1800, producing enough new poems. Coleridge originally planned to finish his poem ‘Christabel’ in order to include it; but he didn’t after all, concentrating instead on helping Wordsworth to get ready a
bout forty of his new poems for the second volume, and insisting that only Wordsworth’s name should appear in either volume, even though his own work, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, was still to be included in the first volume.

  The volumes were printed in Bristol, though they were to be published by Longmans in London, and Coleridge got their young Bristol friend, Humphry Davy, still only twenty-two, to do the final proof-checking and seeing through the press. Davy, though emerging as a brilliant chemist, was also an amateur poet and writer. William gave him instructions to keep an eye on the punctuation, saying that he could make any changes to it that he thought fit, since William himself wasn’t very good at punctuation.

  The new poems in the second volume included ‘Strange fits of passion’, and some other Lucy poems (the ones written in Germany); ‘The Brothers’ (a poem based on the story of the death of a shepherd in Ennerdale, told to William and Coleridge during their Lakes tour); ‘Nutting’, ‘Michael’, ‘Ruth’ and others.

  The new edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared in January 1801, and received limited but very warm acclaim. There was a short review in the Monthly Review and then an enormously long and favourable one in the British Critic. This again appears to have been written by a friend, but it was a most professional review, going through almost every poem, point by point. Literary circles are always fairly small, in every age, and when a writer has had a few works published, he knows, or knows of, most other people in the same field, which of course can either be a help or a hindrance. Wordsworth and Coleridge, closely followed by Southey, had apparently cut themselves off in the wilds of Lakeland, but, by their university education and early London life, they were known to many people in the London literary world.

  Although only two reviews appeared, there was a great deal of talk and excitement, with people telling their friends which poems they liked best. Even Southey had now come to appreciate them, writing to a friend that he found ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ ‘to my taste excellent.… I have never been so much affected and so well, as by some passages there.’

  It is a little harder to decide what Charles Lamb thought, as he wrote rather teasing letters to friends, poking fun at William and Coleridge behind their backs. William, Dorothy and Coleridge all valued Lamb’s opinion, as he was a vital and influential member of the younger literary circle, and William had at once sent him a copy. Lamb replied at great length, giving his detailed criticisms, and deciding that on balance he preferred the first volume. William at once jumped to the defence of the new poems, which highly amused Lamb. Writing to another friend in February 1801, he describes the whole affair with typical Lamb wit.

  So you don’t think there’s a Word’s-worth of good poetry in the great L.B.? I daren’t put the dreaded syllables at their just length.… Between you and me the L. Ballads are but drowsy performances.…

  I had need be cautious henceforward what opinion I give. All the North of England are in a turmoil. Cumberland and Westmoreland have already declared a state of war. I lately received from Wordsworth a copy of the second volume, with excuses owing to an ‘almost insurmountable aversion from Letter-writing’. This letter I answered in due form and time, and enumerated several passages which had most affected me, adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved me so forcibly as the ‘Ancient Mariner’, ‘The Mad Mother’ or the ‘Lines at Tintern Abbey’. The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-Writer, the purport of which was that he was sorry his 2nd volume had not given me more pleasure. (Devil a hint did I give that it had not pleased me) and was ‘compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy thoughts’ (I suppose from the LB).…

  This was not to be all my castigation. Coleridge, who had not written to me for some months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my hardy presumption; four long pages equally sweaty and more tedious, came from him; assuring me that when the works of a man of true genius, such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should suspect the fault to lie ‘in me and not in them’, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. What am I to do with such people? I shall certainly write them a very merry letter.

  Lamb might have been having sport with William and Coleridge and their heavy seriousness, but he genuinely admired much that William had written, as did many of their contemporaries. So much so, that the two volumes were reprinted the following year, 1802, and again in 1805.

  There was no recognition of these early editions of Lyrical Ballads in the Edinburgh Review, which was founded in 1802 and quickly became the most powerful voice in English literary criticism. It was begun by a group of young Edinburgh liberals, notably Francis Jeffrey (its famous editor), Sydney Smith and Henry Brougham, and built its reputation on its savage reviews. Many of the great nineteenth-century writers, such as Scott, Macaulay and Matthew Arnold, later became contributors. The editors were well aware of the growing success of Lyrical Ballads, but chose to ignore it, apparently because of what they considered the conceit of William’s Preface.

  He had written a short introduction, which he called an ‘Advertisement’, for the first edition, back in 1798; it was here that he described the poems as ‘experiments’. But he went to town with the two-volume edition, producing a six-thousand-word Preface which in the end did him, and his poems, more harm than good. On their walks, Coleridge had spent hours and hours discussing the philosophy of poetry with William, as had other literary friends, like Hazlitt, but these conversations usually ended in some acrimony, with William laying down the law on what poetry should be all about. Coleridge knew about the new Preface, but he later said it was all Wordsworth’s doing—while William later said he’d written it out of good nature, because of a request from Coleridge.

  The Preface made William many unnecessary enemies, prejudicing several writers against him for ever, just because he was foolhardy enough to try to dictate what was and what was not poetry, but it is a document which has endless fascination for all students of Wordsworth. This is not the place to discuss it properly, as our concern is with the main narrative of William’s life, but it can’t be ignored completely, as it is considered the first example in the history of English literature of a creative artist trying to analyse his own creative methods Here Wordsworth was in many ways a hundred years ahead of his time—as he was in his self-analysis in The Prelude, which in many of its childhood insights pre-dated Freud.

  Today, the study of ‘creative writing’, and all the analysis that goes; with it, is seen as a serious and proper subject, especially in the American universities. But back in the 1800s, the majority of young literary men thought William’s analysis, in his Preface, was the height of pretension and conceit, not to say gibberish. Byron, after he had read it, considered Wordsworth an idiot, as daft as his ‘Idiot Woman with her Idiot Boy’.

  The most quoted line in the Preface concerns his definition of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. On reading the passage fully, I realized that I, for one, had never fully understood Wordsworth’s meaning. Over the passage of time, only the first half of his theory has survived to be quoted. But in fact Wordsworth goes on to include several more stages in the act of creation:

  Poetry takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood, successful composition generally begins … so that in describing any passions whatsoever, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment.

  In other words, if I now understand Wordsworth correctly, the tranquil stage disappears when the moment of writing begins, with the original excitement and enjoyment being recaptured in the act of writing. A great many creative writers
today would agree that this is true, though there are examples of different writers going through different stages of composition, experiencing different creative processes.

  It is an indication of Wordsworth’s character that, when he did come to his conclusion, he should think it defined the nature of all poetry, once and for all. What it defined was Wordsworth’s creative process. For that alone, we should be grateful.

  William did something else that was new for him with this two-volume edition, something almost all writers have done at some stage, though it was rather surprising in William, considering what we know of his character and habits so far. He sent off a series of complimentary copies of the edition to eminent people of the day, such as the Duchess of Devonshire, William Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. With the presentation copies went a signed letter from William, full of the most toadying sentiments, flattering the recipients in a desperate bid for their favour and patronage. Apparently this idea had come from Coleridge, who wanted to act as William’s public relations man, and Coleridge actually dictated many of the letters. But the letter to Fox was definitely written by William himself and was utterly obsequious in tone: ‘In common with the whole English People I have observed in your public character a constant predominance of sensibility of heart.… This habit cannot but have made you dear to Poets; and I am sure that if since your first entrance into public life there has been a single true poet living in England, he must have loved you.’