William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  ‘They are both very ill,’ William wrote to Richard. ‘Dorothy especially on whom this loss will long take deep hold. I shall do my best to comfort her; but John was dear to me and my heart will never forget him. God rest his soul!

  ‘We wish you were with us. God keep the rest of us together. The set is now broken.’

  William had always looked upon his three brothers and sister as a tight little unit, isolated by the early deaths of their parents and forced to struggle alone against the wicked world, and he saw the death of John as a terrible omen, convinced that more was bound to follow. The whole household went into a great emotional decline.

  William’s friends rallied round in a most heartening way, even those who might previously have poked fun at him behind his back. Walter Scott sent his condolences and Southey wrote a most touching letter: ‘I scarcely know what to say to you after the thunderstroke, nor whether I ought to say anything. Only—whenever you feel or fancy yourself in a state to derive any advantage from company—I will come to you or do you come here.’ William at once invited Southey over: ‘If you could bear to come to this house of mourning tomorrow, I should be forever thankful. We weep much today—and that relieves us.’ Southey came over at once and stayed several days with them, comforting them in their distress. ‘He wept with us in our sorrow,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘and for that cause I think I must always love him.’ It is often said that Wordsworth and Southey, for all their geographical nearness, were not really close friends, but at this time they certainly were, forming a bond in grief which was never broken.

  Charles Lamb, who had often mocked Wordsworth in his letters, proved of invaluable help. A rumour had been circulating that John Wordsworth had somehow mismanaged the ship, and then, in guilt and shame, had made little effort to save his own life. Lamb was employed by the East India Company and he used his position to clear up the mystery of John’s death, personally interviewing survivors, and finally proving, after two months of investigations, that John had in no way been to blame for the disaster.

  Coleridge was at a public reception in Malta at the Governor’s house when a guest casually told him the news and he was instantly taken ill, collapsing and hurting his neck in the fall. His notebooks show the depth of his feeling, recalling all the joyous times he’d had with John: ‘O dear John Wordsworth. Ah that I could but have died for you, and you have gone home, married Sarah Hutchinson, and protected my poor little ones. O how very very gladly would I have accepted the conditions.’ It’s not known how definite John was in his intention to marry Sarah one day, or whether Coleridge had turned their friendship into marriage in his own imagination; but others in the family had also thought the union possible.

  When William began to recover from the first emotional shock, he realized that he’d probably also suffered a financial one, a blow which could prove just as crippling. John’s £20,000 worth of investments also included William’s own personal savings and those of Dorothy.

  In a long, rather self-pitying, almost begging letter to Sir George Beaumont, William went into the details of his finances, describing how he’d managed somehow to live on the £900 Calvert legacy, plus £100 from Lyrical Ballads, throughout the last eight years. But to provide for their future well-being, he and Dorothy had risked £1,200 of their Lowther money on John’s voyage. John had died, trying to ensure a secure life for William. Now all was lost.

  Sir George immediately sent William some money by return—a noble and very typical gesture. It turned out to be unnecessary, as Richard Wordsworth soon afterwards informed William that the ship and cargo had been fully insured, so their investment would not be lost after all. William was naturally rather embarrassed by what he’d written and Sir George’s generosity, but he decided to keep the gift after all, to buy some books.

  The death of his brother stopped William writing any poetry for over two months, but long after that they were still all silently weeping whenever John’s name was mentioned. The tragedy had a profound effect on all of them, despite the fact that John hadn’t been to Grasmere for over four years—though William had met him in London two years previously, when he and Dorothy were returning from Calais. His death seemed to make them suddenly aware of their own lives, as all the memories which he had shared with them, even back to childhood, flooded back. ‘My father in an allusion used to call him Ibex, the shyest of all the beasts.’ (This is one of the few references in all William’s writings to his father.) William felt from now on that he had to live his life for John’s sake, doing his best to produce something worthy of John’s memory. As a physical memento, he asked Richard to retrieve for him any personal remains found on the ship, such as John’s telescope, or perhaps his box writing-desk. John’s sword was eventually salvaged and sent to William—and is still in the Wordsworth family today.

  John was almost perpetually in our minds [wrote William], was always there as an object of pleasure; in this he differed from all our friends, from Coleridge in particular, in connection with whom we have many melancholy, fearful and unhappy feelings, but with John it was all comfort and expectation and pleasure. We have lost him at a time when we are young enough to have been justified in looking forward to many happy years to be passed in his society, and when we are too old to outgrow the loss.

  Grasmere contained so many memories associated with John that it confirmed them in their intention to move. ‘This Vale is changed to us,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘It can never be what it has been and as we cannot spend our days here the sooner we remove the better.’ In any case, they were upset by changes in Grasmere, by the tourists and by the new buildings, particularly one being built by an attorney from Liverpool called Crump. Mr Crump must have been a man of some means, because he was one of several people whom Hatfield (the Beast of Buttermere) had defrauded, using his name on bills. ‘A temple of abomination,’ wrote William, ‘this house will stare you in the face from every part of the Vale and entirely destroy its character and simplicity and seclusion.’

  The problem about moving was Coleridge. As we have seen, the Wordsworths couldn’t make definite plans without knowing what he was going to do. ‘We have entirely made up our minds upon quitting Grasmere,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘as soon as ever Coleridge has fixed upon and procured a residence for himself.’

  Throughout the summer of 1805 they waited, expecting Coleridge every month, but they were still there when Christmas came. As usual on Christmas Eve, her birthday, Dorothy had suitably maudlin thoughts: ‘Six Christmases have we spent at Grasmere and though the freshness of life was passed away even when we came hither, I think these years have been the happiest of my life.’

  It is always tempting, though dangerous, to see what others never saw at the time, to stand back with the benefit of hindsight, presuming to detect patterns, pinpointing changes, encapsulating the strands of other people’s lives. Yet one can’t always rely on the participants to do it for us, since they are rarely aware themselves that they are changing.

  William Wordsworth as a young man was different from William Wordsworth as a middle-aged man. Few people would argue about that. When and how and why the changes came about are much more difficult to agree upon, but it seems to me that in about 1805 he reached a watershed in his life. William at thirty-five held rather different views from William at twenty-five though he himself never seems to have remarked on it, which is strange, considering the degree of introspection with which he analysed his poetic development. His close family, his domestic partners, don’t seem to have remarked on it either—but then, when you are close to someone, it’s hard to see the changes. It was the younger writers coming up in the world, the new commentators and activists, who realized that William wasn’t the person he once was—or wasn’t, at least, the person they’d led themselves to believe he once was.

  Marriage had a big effect on him; that was certainly one clearly defined staging post in his life. He had now taken on hostages to fortune and become very conscious of his responsibilities and duties as
a family man. In all his letters, he now seems suddenly so obsessed by money, not in a greedy, avaricious way—greedy people wouldn’t choose to be poets—but seeing money as a means of safety and security. He was the least spendthrift of men, a master of frugality, with no expensive luxuries or vices. Perhaps it was the Lowthers who did it. He saw how they had ruined his early life and he didn’t want it to happen with his own family. He’d been so carefree in those wandering, post-Cambridge days, with only himself to think about. Now it was as if his childhood insecurities had arrived to haunt him.

  He was not only married to Mary—he still had Dorothy and to a lesser extent Sarah Hutchinson; thus there were three women looking after so many of his needs, domestic and secretarial. Ten years earlier he’d walked alone, a rebel without any real close friends, refusing help and guidance, going his own way, but insecure, not sure of his aims. Now, he was becoming insulated, surrounded by attentive women—if not always doting ones, as Coleridge alleged. It wasn’t surprising that he became more self-opinionated, not having outsiders to put him down. When they did, in the way of bad reviews, the women were there to protect and comfort him.

  His male friends had changed. Coleridge had gone abroad, and although the Wordsworths still longed for his return, and were planning their future life around him, the things that he had meant to them could never be recaptured. Coleridge now made them melancholy, just as much as they made him happy. William’s new male friends were older, like Sir George Beaumont, or becoming establishment figures, like Walter Scott and Humphry Davy, both eventually to be knighted for services to their respective professions. William often called himself a recluse, which was untrue, but for some years he had been cut off from regular London contacts and all the new movements and influences.

  Politically, there had been drastic changes in William’s outlook. His new friends tended to have Tory views and, like Southey, he was losing his radical fervour. The war with France had a confusing and complicating effect on his politics, one which is hard to appreciate fully today. William didn’t think he had basically changed, still loving liberty and democracy as he always had done. It was the revolutionaries who had changed. They had let him down. They’d turned to excesses, creating a tyranny, and were in turn being replaced by a tyrant. England, whose institutions, such as the aristocracy, the Church and the government, he had once despised, now seemed the home of fairness and freedom and all the best moral values.

  The death of John had a very sobering effect, hardening William’s resolve to live a moral, upright life and to be worthy of his calling. He’d never cheated or prostituted his art for immediate gain or fame, but at the same time he hadn’t castigated those who did fall to such temptations. Now, he started telling others how to behave, moralizing and sermonizing. His own shortcomings as a young man were almost forgotten, or he forced himself to forget them, perhaps out of guilt, putting the whole Annette saga out of his mind, becoming almost a puritan in his attitudes to life as the years went on.

  As for his poetry, most experts agree that his genius was fading by 1805, though he still had a great deal of fine verses in him. In his great Immortality Ode, which he completed in 1804, he himself mourns the changes brought with age. ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’ He finished The Prelude in 1805, and worked on some new poems, which included work from his Scottish Tour. It also included ‘Ode to Duty’. It is hard to imagine him writing that back in his Cambridge days.

  One of the dangers in seeing watersheds, and attempting to define changes in someone’s personality, is to forget that the young man is still inside the middle-aged body, if rather deeper down, hiding away. William might on the surface have become more reactionary and conservative in these middle years, but he was still liable to surprise.

  Here he is in 1806, in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, making some witty, rather risque observations, the sort of light descriptive writing we don’t normally associate with Wordsworth, either in youth or middle age:

  I am now writing in the Moss hut, a place of retirement for the eye and well suited to my occupations. I cannot however refrain from smiling at the situation in which I sometimes find myself here; as for instance the other morning when I heard a voice which I knew to be a male voice, crying out from the road below, in a tone exquisitely effeminate, ‘Sautez, sautez, apportez, apportez; vous ne le ferez pas, venez done Pandore, venez venez.’ Guess who this creature could be, thus speaking to his Lap-dog in the midst of our venerable mountains? It is one of the two nondescripts who have taken the Cottage for the summer which we thought you might occupy, and who go about parading the valley in all kinds of fantastic dresses, green leather caps, turkey half-boots, jackets of fine linen, or long dressing gowns, as suit them. Now you hear them in the roads; now you find them lolling in this attire, book in hand, by a brook-side—then they pass your window in their Curricle. Today the Horses tandem wise, and tomorrow abreast; or on Horseback, as suits their fancies. One of them we suspect to be painted, and the other, though a pale cheeked Puppy, is surely not surpassed by his blooming Brother. If you come you will see them, and I promise you they will be a treat.’

  You never see that letter quoted in any literary study of Wordsworth. It makes a pleasant change after all the gloom and melancholy.

  INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

  Some early stanzas from Wordsworth’s greatest ode, completed in 1804. He was thinking back to his childhood days in Hawkshead and his early visions, now beginning to fade.

  The Child is father of the Man;

  And I could wish my days to be

  Bound each to each by natural piety.

  THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

  The earth, and every common sight,

  To me did seem

  Apparelled in celestial light,

  The glory and the freshness of a dream,

  It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

  Turn wheresoe’er I may,

  By night or day,

  The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

  The Rainbow comes and goes,

  And lovely is the Rose,

  The Moon doth with delight

  Look round here when the heavens are bare,

  Waters on a starry night

  Are beautiful and fair;

  The sunshine is a glorious birth;

  But yet I know, where’er I go,

  That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

  The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

  Hath had elsewhere its setting,

  And cometh from afar:

  Not in entire forgetfulness,

  And not in utter nakedness,

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come

  From God, who is our home.

  12

  Coleridge Returns

  1806–1808

  WILLIAM decided he would give himself a spring holiday in early 1806: go off on his own for once, buck himself up with a change of scenery. He went to London, his first visit there for almost four years, knowing that this time he would be rather welcome in many literary circles. As the author of the successful Lyrical Ballads—four editions so far, and still selling well—many people now wanted to meet him. He could move around freely and easily on his own. Mary couldn’t come with him, as she was pregnant, yet again. Dorothy stayed at home, worrying if William should travel all that way, having just been ‘tormented with the piles’.

  It had been a rather claustrophobic winter in Dove Cottage—all cramped in the tiny bedrooms, sleeping two to a bed, babies doubling with adults, everyone restless and unsettled, still not knowing where or when they were moving, waiting for Coleridge’s return. The depression of John’s death hadn’t yet fully lifted. William, naturally enough, longed for a little excitement in his life: ‘I am chiefly come to crowd as many people and sight seeing as
I can into one month with an odd sort of hope that it may be of some use both to my health of body and mind.’

  He had seen himself as something of a recluse when he’d returned to his native hills six years previously, and that was certainly how he was regarded by his old London friends; but his household had grown enormously in a very short time. It’s hard to be alone with a young family about, or with three ladies ministering to their needs, or with endless visitors requiring amusement. And although he disliked towns, and never wanted to live in one, there was scarcely a year from now on in which he didn’t visit London. In the spring of the next two years, he made similar trips, though for different reasons.

  He stayed two months in London this time—not one month, as he had planned—and went to several smart literary parties and society soirees, including a party given by the Marchioness of Stafford, where he wore his hair powdered and carried a cocked hat, and a ball given by Mrs Charles James Fox, where he met Fox himself, just a few months before his death. As a young man, Fox, the great liberal, had been one of William’s heroes, so it was worth getting his hair done, and they had a little chat about poetry. Wordsworth’s name didn’t appear in the VIP guest list in the Morning Post for either of these functions, as he was very much a passing entrant in society, but he was moving around and even met Lady Holland for the first time, the leading Whig hostess of the day.

  Many people who felt in touch with the literary world, especially with its avant-garde elements, wanted to have a glimpse of the man behind what was now being referred to as the new school of poetry, as much because it was disliked and had annoyed as because it was popular. It had in fact been overtaken as the number one literary topic by The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which had just appeared, hot from the presses (they actually did advertise volumes as being ‘hotpressed’), and William graciously wrote to his friend Scott to tell him so: ‘I heard of your Last Minstrel everywhere in London; your Poem is more popular and more highly spoken of than you can possibly be aware of.’