Was there more to it than a brother-sister love? Dorothy was certainly an emotional woman, given to outbursts, laughter and tears, and great shows of affection. There are references in her letters which show she loved Coleridge, or her brother John, almost as much as William. She addressed Annette effusively, as a dear and beloved sister, without having met her.
Accepted habits and signs of affection are bound to have changed in nearly two hundred years, and we would do well not to translate everything too literally into modern terms. William and Dorothy were orphans, after all. They only had each other. Physical contact between brother and sister was more normal then than it is today.
Nonetheless, and making all allowances, it was a rather strange, not to say intense, relationship. Their love appears almost suffocating at times, though there are no references in her Journals to any rows, or even a cross word. We can only guess at the climaxes, the highs and the lows, from the strange clues, but there are enough of these to indicate that at times the relationship verged on the unhealthy.
Dorothy was a virgin—of that there is little doubt—and there’s no reference to her ever having had a serious boy friend, in the courting sense. Coleridge loved her, calling her Wordsworth’s ‘exquisite sister’, and so did all William’s friends, each impressed by her mind and personality. Hazlitt was so enchanted by her, De Quincey later alleged, that he proposed to her, but Dorothy turned him down. Not even those who eventually fell out with William had anything nasty to say about Dorothy.
She was not physically very attractive, but in her early days that does not appear to have mattered, because her sheer physical presence was so striking. ‘Her face was of Egyptian brown,’ De Quincey recalled, ‘rarely in a woman of English birth had I seen a more determined gipsy tan. Her eyes were not soft, but wild and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm and ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her.’
One or two friends detected similarly ardent, even animal, feelings in William himself, though the only known incident in his life involving animal passion was his sudden and passionate love affair with Annette. He at least wasn’t a virgin.
Today, in this permissive, uninhibited, fully contraceptived age, it would be hard to imagine a healthy, attractive young single man staying celibate for ten years, from the age of twenty-two to thirty-two, unless he was a monk who’d taken vows or was homosexual. In ten long years, in the prime of his life, when he’d already had one passionate sexual affair, how could he have managed it? would be the modern reaction. He certainly met girls, entertained girls, visited houses where girls were living, admired a pretty face, and was well aware of the sisters of his male friends; but there’s not the slightest sign, so far, of any serious relationship since the Annette affair. We have to believe, then, that for ten years he was chaste. We have to believe that in those days young men—and young ladies—found it much easier to resist. Morals and methods were different, and it simply wasn’t considered a hardship. You might say this is how it should be. What’s so hard or reprehensible about being sexually pure? Why judge others by our shocking, decadent standards? All the same, one does wonder.
In the 1950s Mr F.W. Bateson, a well-known Wordsworth scholar and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, raised a suggestion that could help to explain William’s behaviour. William and Dorothy were lovers. If the discovery of the Annette letters caused a furore in the 1920s, it was nothing to the scandal caused by the theory of incest, which Mr Bateson discussed in his book Wordsworth, a Reinterpretation. This is a serious psychological study of Wordsworth’s poetry, suggesting that he was a much more subjective writer than is usually thought—just as much as Keats or Shelley. In his early life, writes Mr Bateson, Wordsworth was subject to strong sensual passions and emotions, which are in his poetry, if you look for them, though most readers have missed them (such as Shelley, for example, who called Wordsworth a ‘solemn and unsexual man’). Bateson cites as evidence one of Wordsworth’s two earliest books, Descriptive Sketches, where the poet experiences ‘voluptuous dreams’ by Lake Como and sees ‘shadowy breasts’, just like many a normal twenty-year-old. Wordsworth, however, expurgated these references when the poem was reprinted in 1820.
As for the possibility of incest, Mr Bateson pointed to Dorothy’s love-letters, the descriptions of physical contact between the pair, certain actions which would indicate panic (as things perhaps became too hot for William to deal with), and others which might betray guilt; but his main evidence rests on the fact that someone, at some later date, removed crucial passages from Dorothy’s Journals. This evidence is all rather circumstantial, and somewhat negative in that two missing pages from the original text, which Mr Bateson considers might contain evidence of incest, could be harmless. (In a later edition of his book, Mr Bateson rather softens some of his assertions.)
One day, some letters, at present unknown, might suddenly turn up, as with Annette, throwing completely new light on the whole relationship with Dorothy, revealing more precisely William’s true feelings. In the meantime, all that can honestly be said is that he and Dorothy were a very devoted and very loving brother and sister.
There then occurred an important event which spoils the incest theories, though no doubt someone could argue that it provides proof of guilt. In 1802, after two very devoted, intimate, domestic years alone with Dorothy in Dove Cottage, William got married.
If you relied solely on Dorothy’s Journals for enlightenment, you wouldn’t know what was going on. It is only when you look back, having got to the end and found that a wedding has taken place, that you can understand little remarks, half references, trips and letters which must obviously have been part of the build-up to the marriage. But Dorothy never says at any time that William has become engaged and that a marriage will take place.
One morning in July 1802, according to the Journals, we find that Dorothy and William have got up and are heading south for London. In a roundabout way, they turn out to be en route to France, which must come as a big surprise to any innocent reader. You’ve guessed, of course, where they are going. To see Annette.
If William is to get married, he must first disentangle himself from Annette, tell her face to face what he plans to do, discuss it with her and make appropriate arrangements. It sounds very much the sort of thing William would want to do, though no doubt his bride-to-be, who had been told about Annette, had also insisted. It was an interlude in his life which had preyed on his mind for many years. It needed a meeting to close it for good.
Because Dorothy offers no preparatory explanations in her Journals, the exact sequence of events can only be guessed at, though, from her letters to friends, it looks as if William had become engaged earlier in the year, probably in February. By good fortune, this year, 1802, turned out to be the only year for ten years that William could possibly have got back to France. In March 1802 the Peace of Amiens was signed, and for a brief period—it lasted for little over a year—England and France were not at war. Perhaps knowing that peace was coming encouraged William to get engaged. If the war had not halted, would he have got married without first seeing Annette? As recently as 1800, William had said he had no thoughts of marriage.
There was another event connected with his marriage—connected in the sense that it eased the thought of marriage and eased the separation from Annette, though whether it was in any way a cause or just a coincidence is again not clear. In May 1802, the bad Earl of Lonsdale, who had ruined the Wordsworths’ early years by his meanness, died. By July 1802, when William set off, the family knew that the new Earl planned to pay off all the old debts, and that the Wordsworth children should at last get their inheritance.
In London, while they were crossing the river on their way to the coast, Dorothy, as usual, made a note of their impressions. William later turned them into one of his best-known sonnets, that on Westminster Bridge. ‘We mounted the Dover Coach at Chari
ng Cross. It was a beautiful morning. The City, St Pauls, with the River and a Multitude of little boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge. The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke and they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such pure light that there was even something like a purity of Nature’s own grand spectacles.…’
They were on their way to Calais, where they’d arranged their appointment with Annette. She was travelling up from Blois to meet them. Perhaps they thought it could have been dangerous for an English couple to venture too far into the heartland of France, just in case war should break out again. Perhaps they wanted a half-way, neutral, anonymous rendezvous. Their meeting took place on the sands at Calais, within view of the English coast—emotionally comforting no doubt, just in case things went too far.
We left Annette Vallon in 1792—heavily pregnant, waving a sad farewell to her lover, having come back to Blois in readiness for the birth. Before William left, she’d got him to touch and feel the baby clothes which she’d already bought. Judging by her subsequent letters, Annette could be as emotional and sentimental as Dorothy. William seemed to like emotional ladies.
During the previous ten years, other elements in her character had appeared, such as courage and strong beliefs. The Terror had been just as violent in the French provincial towns as in Paris, and in Orleans, which had been a noted royalist centre, the local Jacobins conducted a witch-hunt of royalist sympathizers. Annette’s brother, Paul Vallon, who stood godfather to William’s child, was one of thirty arrested for allegedly assaulting a local republican politician. Nine went to the scaffold, but Paul managed to escape and went into hiding. Annette helped to protect him and from then on became actively involved in the underground movement, hiding priests and royalists, organizing escapes, plots and hiding-places. She was constantly in danger of losing her own life, but though her name appeared in various records as a known royalist, working for counter-revolutionary movements, she managed to escape being put in prison. On one police file she was described as ‘Widow Williams of Blois; gives shelter to Chouans’.
She obviously had a great deal more to think about than her departed lover during these ten years, but it is interesting that she should have remained unmarried and called herself either Madame William or Veuve William. Her daughter had been christened Anne Caroline Wordwodsth (sic). William still appears to have been the only man in her life.
None of her letters appears to have got through to William after 1795, but they started arriving in late 1801, when negotiations for the Amiens peace were under way. Dorothy refers to letters arriving from ‘Poor Annette’, no doubt telling of her sufferings and dangers, but they are simply mentioned in passing, along with letters from other friends, such as Sarah Hutchinson.
William and Annette now had in common a hatred of Napoleon, who was then in Paris, having taken over control of France. It was on 15 August 1802, while the one-time lovers were walking up and down the Calais sands, that Napoleon made himself Consul for life. Many English people did go to Paris to catch a glimpse of the new hero, including Charles Fox and Thomas Poole, Coleridge’s friend, but doubtless William and Annette couldn’t face Paris and such celebrations. Annette hated Napoleon because her long years of work and sacrifice for the restoration of the Bourbons had now been ruined. William had had hopes after the collapse of the Terror that a true and liberal republican government would return, but now a new tyrant had arisen.
They also had in common nine-year-old Caroline. She romped and played on the beach while her mother and father went on their incessant walks. William wrote several sonnets in Calais and in one he refers to Caroline, calling her ‘Dear Child’, though it wasn’t known when the sonnet was published that he had such a child.
They spent four weeks in Calais, which seems an enormously long time for a simple farewell, while William’s bride-to-be was waiting at home for the wedding to take place. What could have taken up all their solemn talks? They would have had a lot of adventures to tell each other; but a gap of ten years imposes barriers, changes relationships, changes people. William’s French must have been quite rusty, while Annette knew no English. Did he still love her in any way? She was now thirty-six and had been through ten tough years. Was Dorothy there as a sort of chaperon, just in case?
Dorothy gives no clue to their conversations: ‘We lodged in tolerably decent sized rooms but badly furnished and with large store of bad smells and dirt in the yard and all about. The weather was very hot. We walked by the sea shore almost every evening with Annette and Caroline or Wm and I alone. I had a bad cold and could not bathe at first but William did.…’
Talk of the impending marriage probably didn’t take up much of their conversation, as Annette probably knew all about that already by letter, but Caroline and her future must have been discussed at length. William might even have offered to take her back to England. Dorothy would have enjoyed being a foster-mother. But after four weeks, they parted, Annette and Caroline going back to Blois. William did not see them again for eighteen years.
You may have guessed by now the name of the lady William was coming home to marry: Mary Hutchinson. Where his relationship with Annette had been short and ecstatic, had begun and ended in a matter of months—an exciting, if brief, moment of passion—his relationship with Mary had gone on slowly, and with little apparent passion, for years—in fact, for almost the whole of his life, if you remember that he first met her, when they were both about three, at Dame Birkett’s school in Penrith. Why did it take so long? What made him marry her when he did? These questions hardly troubled the scholars, until very recently. The discovery of Annette, and all the new possibilities that emerged from this, have been a much more exciting field for speculation. Few questions have been raised about Mary during the last hundred years because it has been thought that the answers would be fairly boring and unimportant. There has been so little evidence of her having had any influence on William’s life or poetry that she has tended to be dismissed as just a mother and housekeeper—someone he happened to marry, when he decided it was time to get married and to be the father of children.
Most people who knew Mary found her very quiet, and one observer remarked that she appeared to have a squint, which wasn’t very kind. Dorothy’s dark complexion, when that was remarked upon, was always seen as something wild and attractive. Wordsworth’s nephew, when he came to write the official family memoir, is strangely silent about Mary, giving no descriptions of her.
It is Dorothy who has left all the valuable letters and journals; Dorothy whom all visitors were impressed by; Dorothy who got written about by other people; Dorothy whom William wrote and talked so much about. This has been so much the case that it is thought by some people that William went to Mary on a complicated rebound from Dorothy—as an escape or release from the insulated, hot-house atmosphere of the two Dove Cottage years. It need not necessarily have been incest that brought about the change. Some sort of climax might have been reached with Dorothy, and William just didn’t want it to go on.
William and Mary had certainly been friends for many years, but, at the same time, he’d left her for many years, going his own way with other people, treating her simply as an old family friend. Even when she came to visit the Wordsworth household in the West Country, he’d left to go to Bristol on her arrival. From the letters, Mary would appear to have been Dorothy’s friend, not William’s, at that stage. He had no thoughts of marriage, to her or anyone else, just two years before the wedding. By 1802, Mary was thirty-two, the same age as William (he was just four months older), and, by the standards of the day, something of an old maid, presumed by all to be destined to spend her life as some sort of housekeeper to one of her brothers, just as Dorothy was doing.
The Hutchinsons had originally come from County Durham to Penrith, where Mary’s father had lived all his life. He was a fairly prosperous tobacconist in the town, which meant that she came from the same sort of shopkeeper
stock as William’s mother’s family. He had eight children (plus two who appear to have died young), all of them orphaned while they were still growing up. (Mary’s mother died in 1783, the same year as William’s father died, and her father two years later.) The Hutchinsons felt they had a lot in common with the Wordsworths and, despite family separations, with both sets of children being sent away to relations, they kept in contact.
There were four Hutchinson sisters, all near in age to William and Dorothy—Mary, Sarah, Joanna and Margaret, the one who died—and four brothers, John, Henry (who went to sea), Tom and George. Mary was particularly close to Tom, who was a farmer. Tom had little money and was always trying to buy himself land and moving about; for a time he lived at Sockburn on Tees—where William and Dorothy visited them on their return from Germany—and then he moved to Yorkshire, where Mary was now living. Those trips by John and William to Yorkshire, referred to by Dorothy in her Journals, therefore have deeper significance, when you realize that William must have been courting Mary.
Dorothy was a dear and beloved friend of Mary’s and it was she who had kept up the letters over the years, much more than William; but she was genuinely upset when William was away visiting her, especially during 1801 and 1802. She need not necessarily have felt personal jealousy; perhaps she just feared for his muse, if he took on the responsibility for a wife and family.
In June 1802, when the marriage had been arranged, and William and Dorothy were about to set off for France, Dorothy wrote to her brother Richard, answering questions that he must have asked her about her own future with William:
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