William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  His marriage will add to his comfort and happiness. Mary Hutchinson is a most excellent woman—I have known her a long time and I know her thoroughly; she has been a dear friend of mine, is deeply attached to William and is disposed to feel kindly to all his family.

  As you express a desire to know what are my expectations, I have every reason to rely upon the affection of my Brothers and their regard for my happiness. I shall continue to live with my Brother William—but he, having nothing to spare nor being likely to have, at least for many years, I am obliged (I need not say how much he regrets this necessity) to consider myself as boarding through my life with an indifferent person. Sixty pounds a year is the sum which would entirely satisfy all my desires. With sixty pounds a year I should fear not any accidents or changes which might befall me. I cannot look forward to the time, when with my habits of frugality, I could not live comfortably on that sum.…

  How reassuring not to have to take inflation into account! In those far-off days, one could see £60 supplying the same needs for forty years ahead. Dorothy’s financial hopes rested on her brothers Richard, John and Christopher, all now pursuing their respective careers; she hoped they would be kind enough to allow her £20 a year each, which they readily agreed to do. She had of course no job or income of her own, though that horrid Uncle Kit, the one who’d blighted William’s early Penrith years, had died, leaving nothing to William or any other Wordsworth son, but £100 to Dorothy. She apparently did not know at the time she wrote the letter quoted above (though she came to know soon afterwards) that she would be getting her share of the Lowther money.

  Dorothy’s agitation of course did not spring from solely financial causes, and we can only guess at her real emotions. She’d welcomed Mary’s visits over the last few years, firstly at Racedown and then during those early months at Dove Cottage; Mary had been part of their circle. But Dorothy must have believed William when he’d said he had no thoughts of marriage. However, when it was decided, she immediately addressed Mary in all letters as her sister, as she’d done with Annette, accepting her as William’s bride-to-be. But underneath, what did she feel?

  ‘I have long loved Mary as a sister,’ Dorothy wrote to her old friend Jane, just a few days before the wedding was due to take place. ‘She is equally attached to me, this being so you will guess that I look forward with perfect happiness to this Connection between us, but, happy as I am, I half dread that concentration of all tender feelings, past, present and future, which will come upon me on the wedding morning.…’

  The wedding took place at Brompton Church, near Scarborough in Yorkshire, on 4 October 1802, and Dorothy was right about the confusion of her feelings. Her description of the day is one of the strangest and most revealing accounts in the whole of her Journals.

  She and William had arrived a few days before the wedding, and Dorothy had felt ill most of the time. The night before, she had slept with William’s wedding-ring on her finger. In the morning, when the time came to go to the church, she couldn’t face it:

  At a little after 8 o’clock I saw them go down the avenue towards the church. William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring—with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before. He slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently.

  I kept myself as quiet as I could but when I saw the two men [Mary’s brothers] running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer and threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything, till Sarah came upstairs to me and said ‘They are coming’. This forced me from the bed where I lay and I moved I knew not how straight forwards, faster than my strength could carry me, till I met my Beloved William and fell upon his bosom.…

  It was a very quiet wedding, apart from Dorothy’s hysterics. There were no senior members of the Hutchinson family there, just three of her brothers and two sisters. The Hutchinson children, like the Wordsworths, had been placed under the care of guardians when their parents died, including a wealthy, landed uncle, from whom Mary had high hopes of some financial help, but they cut her off when she married William. One of them described him as a ‘vagabond’. Like William’s own guardian uncles, they considered William a waster, a rebel with no proper employment. They might possibly have heard rumours about his French affair. Whatever the reasons, the couple received not one single wedding present. William even signed a marriage bond, in which he agreed to pay £200, should it ever come to light that there was any impediment to his marriage. Did someone suspect that perhaps he might even be married already?

  After the wedding, all three came straight back to the Lakes, William with his bride Mary and his sister Dorothy, where all three lived happily ever after.…

  WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

  William and Dorothy crossed Westminster Bridge on 31 July 1802, on the way to Calais. Dorothy made notes of their impressions. William later wrote a sonnet.

  EARTH has not anything to show more fair:

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

  A sight so touching in its majesty:

  This City now doth, like a garment, wear

  The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

  Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

  Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

  All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

  Never did sun more beautifully steep

  In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

  Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

  The river glideth at his own sweet will:

  Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

  And all that mighty heart is lying still!

  10

  Scotland

  1803

  FIVE days after the marriage of William and Mary, there appeared a most curious announcement in the Morning Post—a gentle bit of teasing, no doubt the work of a close friend, which greatly upset William, who wasn’t quite in the mood for such jokes:

  Monday last, W. Wordsworth, Esq., was married to Miss Hutchinson of Wykeham, near Scarborough, and proceeded immediately, with his wife and his sister, for his charming cottage in the little Paradise Vale of Grasmere. His neighbour, Mr Coleridge, resides in the Vale of Keswick, 13 miles from Grasmere. His house (situated on a low hill at the foot of Skiddaw, with the Derwent Lake in front, and the romantic River Greta winding round the hill) commands perhaps the most various and interesting prospects of any house in the island. It is a perfect panorama of that wonderful vale, with its two lakes, and its complete circle, or rather ellipse, of mountains.

  William had sent the usual sort of curt and formal wedding announcement to the local paper in Yorkshire, which appeared the same day (9 October 1802), but had no knowledge whatsoever of the publication of the Morning Post’s purple prose. The reference to his sister, and to the fact that all three went back to his charming cottage, must have been rather hurtful. It was the first of a long series of such sly digs at him and his female household, that went on for years. The suggestion that he and Coleridge were setting themselves up as some sort of tourist attraction complete with estate agent’s flowery descriptions, also upset him, especially as most people would think he’d been responsible for it. It was worrying for him, anyway, setting up a new household, without having outsiders being malicious about a very sensitive subject.

  Dorothy was just as furious, though other members of the family couldn’t quite see what all the fuss was about. ‘It is not quite so bad as I thought it would have been from what you said,’ wrote brother John, the captain of the Earl of Abergavenny, who’d recently returned from another voyage.

  Dorothy was still smarting three years later, putting the blame upon Daniel Stuart, editor of the Morning Post: ‘Upon my brother’s marriage, he inserted in the Morning Post the most ridiculous paragraph that was ever penned.’ It is still not definitely known who wrote the offending paragraph. It could have been Stuart
himself, perhaps based on gossip from Charles Lamb, who had recently visited Dove Cottage (while William and Dorothy had been away in France) and had stayed at Keswick. The paragraph indicates first-hand knowledge of Greta Hall—and was couched in Lamb’s style of humour.

  It could of course have been Coleridge, mentioning himself in the paragraph by way of a double bluff; but Coleridge, though he did have a keen sense of humour, wasn’t at that time in the mood for such fun. On the wedding-day itself, the Morning Post had published his ‘Dejection: an Ode’. It was the seventh anniversary of his own marriage and he saw this happy event in William’s life as confirmation of his own unhappy state. The ‘Dejection’ ode was sparked off by his complicated relationship with Sarah Hutchinson. He felt very much alone, compared with William, who had so much—not just his exquisite sister Dorothy, but now a loving wife in Mary and also her sister Sarah, who was equally devoted to William.

  Coleridge was at home in Keswick on the eve of the wedding, having been on a marathon ten-day solo tour of the Lakes while the Wordsworths were away, and had some rather strange dreams, according to the entry in his notebook for 3 October 1802:

  I dreamt that I was asleep in the cloysters at Christ’s Hospital [his old school] and had woken with a pain in my hand from some corrosion. Boys and nurses daughters peeping at me. On their implying that I was not in the School, I answered yes I am. I then recollected that I was thirty and of course could not be in the school. So dreamt of Dorothy, William and Mary—and that Dorothy was altered in every feature, a fat, thick-limbed and rather red haired—in short, no resemblance to her at all—and I said, if I did not know you to be Dorothy, I never should suppose it. Why says she, I have not a feature the same. I was followed up and down by a frightful pale woman who, I thought, wanted to kiss me, and had the property of giving a shameful Disease by breathing in the face.

  There’s some good raw material for an analyst here—and there’s a lot more of the same; it all gives an indication of Coleridge’s mental state. The Wordsworths, despite what Coleridge might in his blacker moods have thought about them, were full of pity and sympathy for him. He was their first guest when eventually all three returned to Dove Cottage after the wedding, and they all followed him back to Greta Hall for a three-day visit. They consented to stay with him, so Dorothy remarks rather heavily in her Journals, ‘Mrs C not being at home’. Coleridge for a while had hopes that they might all move in with him at Greta Hall, but Dorothy’s antipathy for Mrs Coleridge was one of many factors which prevented this.

  Coleridge was still a welcome guest at Dove Cottage—still popping back and forth, despite his bouts of ill health—but jealousy was eating into his soul, as he watched William having all that love and attention. ‘I saw him more and more living wholly among Devotees, having the minutest thing, almost his very eating and drinking, done for him by his Sister, or Wife and I trembled less a Film should rise and thicken on his moral Eye.’

  The Wordsworth household was indeed extremely happy. Dorothy’s half-dreads were ill founded. She doesn’t appear to have been usurped in William’s affections and her place at his side was not affected. ‘Wm fell asleep, lying upon my breast and I upon Mary,’ she wrote in her Journals about the ride home to Grasmere after the wedding. Her domestic routine, as described in her Journals, was now being shared by all three of them:

  William is now sitting by me. I have been beside him ever since tea running the heel of a stocking, repeating some of his sonnets to him, listening to his own repeating. Mary is in the parlour below attending to the baking of cakes and pies. Sarah is in bed in the toothache—beloved William is turning over the leaves of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets, but he keeps his hand to his poor chest pushing aside his breast plate. Mary is well and I am well and Molly is as blithe as last year at this time. Coleridge came this morning with Wedgwood. We all turned out of Wm’s bedroom one by one to meet him. He looked well.…

  William, as ever, was the centre of attention. A very cold day. Wm promised me he would rise as soon as I had carried him his breakfast but he lay in bed till between 12 and one …

  When William was away, Mary and Dorothy had each other for company, and Dorothy didn’t feel as lonely as she would have done before the marriage, though she was by no means happy at her brother’s absence. ‘After dinner we both lay on the floor. Mary slept. I could not for I was thinking of so many things.’

  The Journals come suddenly to a halt in January 1803, just a few months after the wedding, the last entry being about William of course. He wanted some gingerbread—a great speciality in Grasmere—so Dorothy put on her cloak and went off to buy some. A few days previously, in her Journals, she had been vowing to herself to write regularly in the future, having neglected to write anything for several weeks over the Christmas period; but she never did. Thus we leave her for ever in her Grasmere Journals: going out to get gingerbread for her beloved, never to return to her daily domestic notes and thoughts, though she did keep a diary when she was away from home. Subsequent household journals might have been lost of course, or destroyed, but we have to assume there were no more. She had Mary to discuss William with, night and day, and didn’t need the outlet of writing any more. Or perhaps she was just too busy.

  William was not just fortunate in his domestic life—and all three women, Dorothy, Mary and Sarah, were completely happy with each other, with never a hint of disagreement—his financial affairs also began to improve. The Lowther money, £8,500, for the whole Wordsworth family, started to be paid. As they were living together, William and Dorothy got their share jointly; it eventually came to about £3,000 and made a big difference to their household budget. They invested some of it jointly with their brother Captain John, buying shares in his cargo for his next long voyage to China. He returned safely from China in August 1804, so that investment must have improved their finances still further. They left it to their brother Richard to administer the money and they were, as before, always writing to him to settle debts. In December 1803, for example, twelve years after he’d left Cambridge, William got a bill from his college tutor for £10 15s 3 1/2d. William also loaned money to Coleridge, even though old friends, like Montagu, still hadn’t paid back money he’d loaned them years before.

  William also acquired a new and wealthy patron, one who became one of his closest friends and a very influential figure in his life. This was Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter of some note in his day and a great patron of the arts. Sir George encouraged many young artists, such as Constable, and was one of the founders of the National Gallery. He owned a large house in Grosvenor Square and several estates, including a large one in Leicestershire. He and his wife were a middle-aged couple, some sixteen years older than William, but, despite the age gap, they became great personal friends of William, lavishing presents upon him even before they had met him. It was Coleridge who got to know them first, when the Beaumonts spent a holiday in Keswick. They already knew William’s poetry and were ‘half-mad’ to meet him, so Coleridge said. Coleridge told them about all their joint plans and problems, his own ill health, the long journeys back and forth to Grasmere to visit each other, their difficulties with their respective writings. Without telling William, Sir George bought a little property near Keswick—at Applethwaite, on the slopes of Skiddaw—and, through Coleridge, presented it to William. Sir George’s idea was that William could build a house there, or modernize an existing old cottage, and would therefore have a home near Coleridge’s, where they could write happily together. William was rather embarrassed by the gift, but Sir George wouldn’t hear of him declining, and he graciously accepted. He never used the property, being uncertain about Coleridge’s future and realizing that difficulties could arise from the proximity of Mrs Coleridge; but he was soon boasting about his good luck in letters to friends, particularly as the property made him a freeholder of Cumberland and thus able to vote at elections. It was eight weeks before he wrote a thank-you letter to Sir George, but when he did, complaini
ng of pains in his chest, which handicapped his writing letters, he was suitably grateful.

  The Wordsworths’ first child was born in June 1803, just nine months after their wedding. He was christened John, after William’s father. The godparents were Dorothy, Coleridge and their brother Richard. Dorothy was delighted, and her letters from now on are filled with endless details of ‘our little babe’. You would think, from her descriptions, that she was the mother:

  He has blue eyes, a fair complexion, a body as fat as a little pig, arms that are thickening and dimpling and bracelets at his wrists, a very prominent nose, which will be like his Father’s, and head shaped upon the very same model. I send you a lock of his hair sewed to this letter.

  I wish you could see him in his Basket which is neither more nor less than a Meat basket which costs half a crown. In this basket he has floated over Grasmere water asleep and made one of a dinner party at the Island. We often carry it to the orchard seat where he drops asleep beside us.

  William added a note to this paragraph, which shows how carefully he must have read Dorothy’s letters, checking her accounts of their joint family news. Beside the reference to the babe crossing Grasmere in his basket, he makes it clear the baby hadn’t floated off alone: ‘Not like Moses in his cradle of rushes but in a boat, mind that. W.W.’

  One can imagine William reading all Dorothy’s letters, tut-tutting at her endless chatter, but enjoying it, and too lazy to do much himself to keep up contact with their family and friends. In William’s own letters, when of course the pain in his side allowed him to write any, he either discusses business and financial affairs, or lays down the law about poetry or the world in general.

  There’s further evidence that William read Dorothy’s letters in an amusing P.S. at the end of a letter from her to Mrs Clarkson, one of their closest friends, in which she’s been going on about the family illnesses, including troubles with her own bowels and a ‘violent looseness’ that has lasted four days: ‘William after reading over my letter is not half satisfied with what I have said of myself—he bids me add that I always begin with sickness and that any agitation of mind either of joy or sorrow will bring it on. Anything puts me past my sleep, for instance being in much company and hot rooms. Ever since I can remember, going into company made me have violent aches.…’ The P.S. rather proves William’s point.