However, William was doing better in society than Southey, who was also in London at the time. They’d travelled part of the way down in the same coach, Southey leaving when they were near Lincoln, to visit Cambridge. ‘Wordsworth flourishes in London,’ wrote Southey. ‘He powders and goes to all the great routs. No man is more flattered by the attentions of the great, and no man would be more offended to be told so.’ This was rather bitter, coming from Southey, who in his domestic life was a kindly man, but he’d just had the depressing news from his publisher, Longman, that his latest book, Madoc, had earned him only £3 17s 1d in a year, and he was looking around, in vain, for a nice foreign posting, such as Portugal.
While in London, William managed to have the use of some rather stylish quarters, instead of sharing someone’s lodgings, as he’d done in his early London days. He stayed first of all with his brother Christopher, who was still busily ascending the Church of England hierarchy, having been made domestic chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Rector of Lambeth, where he had a handsome, if not completely fashionable, residence. After that, William moved into the heart of Mayfair, staying at Sir George Beaumont’s in Grosvenor Square. He also made a quick trip out to Windsor, to see his uncle, Canon Cookson—the uncle who at one time had banned him from the house, back in his disreputable, revolutionary days, though now, since William was a much more upright and respectable person, he was a welcome visitor.
William had his portrait drawn while he was in London; the artist was Henry Edridge, who had drawn Southey a year previously while up in the Lakes. He’d missed Wordsworth then, but the drawing he did now (used on the cover of this book) is probably the best and most attractive one of Wordsworth and was considered a good likeness of him in his middle years. There’s a slightly amused look about the mouth, sensitive but not sour, which is not apparent in many of his portraits: the later ones, especially, make him look very dour.
Sir George, who paid for Edridge’s drawing of William, was an amateur artist of note, as well as a great patron of artists of all sorts, and William dutifully went along to the Royal Academy exhibition, where he saw a painting of Peel Castle by Sir George, which moved him sufficiently to compose a poem about it.
William didn’t fail to look up his old London friends, such as William Godwin, with whom he dined, though Godwin and his philosophy were now out of favour and he’d become somewhat obscure. He also saw Charles Lamb, who was, as ever, well in touch with London life and London happenings. All in all, it was a very busy eight weeks and, as he said, he hardly had more than five minutes free, certainly not enough time to do any reading. Dorothy was pining for him, trying to compose some poems of her own, and wrote what is tantamount to a love-letter to him, expressing the sort of emotions that had been common in her letters until his marriage: ‘While Mary is undressing to go to bed I take my pen—The wind is howling away the rain beats. Oh my dear William that thou was humming thy own songs in time to it or resting thy hands upon thy knees as thou art used in musings between while work pauses—but thou art happy and it is better perhaps that we should sometimes be separated, even if thou didst not take so much pleasure in things as thou dost.…’
William had in fact indulged in lots of pleasures while away, whatever Dorothy might have felt about them being separated, and came home very refreshed, though in minor ways he would have appreciated an attentive lady in his wake. Six years of domestic bliss had made him rather absent-minded. First of all, he arrived in London with someone else’s key which didn’t fit his trunk, and then, for weeks after his arrival back in Grasmere, Dorothy was writing endless letters trying to sort out the mess he’d made with his belongings. He’d come back with two neckcloths belonging to Sir George, a waistcoat belonging to Canon Cookson, two pairs of socks belonging to his brother Christopher (they were now quite worn out), and a copy of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which certainly wasn’t his, as the Wordsworths’ copy, sent by Scott himself, was at Dove Cottage. On the debit side, he’d lost a pair of shoes. Women do have their place, even in a poet’s life.…
The Wordsworths’ third child was born not long after William’s return in June 1806: a second son whom at first they thought of calling William. Southey came over two days after the birth to pay his respects to the baby and the mother, who’d had a difficult time in labour, the pains being the worst she had suffered so far. Southey said, oh no, not two William Wordsworths!
Southey might have meant this satirically, but the family took it as a serious point. ‘Southey is decided against William,’ wrote Dorothy to Lady Beaumont, ‘he would keep the father’s name distinct and not have two William Wordsworths. It never struck us this way, but we have another objection which does not go beyond our own household and our own particular friends, i.e. that my brother is always called William amongst us and it will create great confusion.’ This is an interesting observation. Coleridge, for example, was apparently always known to his friends—by all the Wordsworths and even by his own wife—as Coleridge. There’s no record that I can find of him having been called Samuel by his contemporaries. It’s hard to know what this indicates, if anything. Fashions in styles of address change. The use of surnames, even amongst very old friends, was normal in those days. William always wrote ‘Dear Scott’, not ‘Dear Walter’, even when he’d known Scott for years, and he addressed an old college friend like Francis Wrangham, whom he’d known most of his adult life, as ‘Dear Wrangham’. William in his turn was addressed as ‘Wordsworth’ by such friends, but in his own house and in his immediate circle he was always William. It could be said to have been a sign of affection, and, as the years went on and he developed his own little ways, like losing his clothes, or taking up some new cause or passion, the ladies of the house became rather teasing in their references to ‘Dear William’, joking him along, making gentle fun of him. They were always reverential about his poems, but a nicely relaxed attitude to him as a person comes through in their letters. They didn’t see him as the stern voice of God, as many outsiders did later, when reading his ‘Ode to Duty’.
In the end, after all the discussions about the name William, the new son was called Tom. It came from Mary’s brother Tom Hutchinson, and he and his wife were godparents.
William was very fond of all his children, and was an attentive father, though from the earliest days Dora seems to have been his favourite. Just after the birth of Tom, William and Dorothy walked across the mountains to Patterdale and Ullswater with Dora, aged two, on William’s back. Whooping cough was raging in Grasmere and they thought they would at least get Dora, who was never very strong, away for a few weeks to their Hutchinson relations on Ullswater. On the highest parts of the mountains, a young man they met took turns in carrying her. ‘She walked as happy as a bird,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘though in a stranger’s arms. She noticed everything we saw and sang her pretty baby songs to the sheep and the cattle as she passed them. “Baa Baa black sheep” etc and “Cushy cow bonny let down thy milk”. She never expressed one want or one wish except now and then to carry her can in her own hands out of which she drank out of streams or when Wm and I were at a distance from her she would say “Ather turn back again”.’
When they got to Ullswater, Dora had done so well that—even though it was very late, and the stars were out and they’d intended to halt and find accommodation for the night—they decided to get a boat there and then and go straight down the lake to John Hutchinson’s house. ‘The little creature had never cried once, never given us anything but sweet smiles, except for the first half hour after we got into the Boat when she screamed and struggled dreadfully, wanting to be out on the water.…’ Dora fell asleep at last, just as they got there, which is what so often happens to toddlers on long journeys.
From all Dorothy’s letters, even when she is writing on mundane, everyday subjects, a gentle glow comes forth, a warmth and happiness. As Coleridge never tired of observing, William was most fortunate in his domestic life.
It was in Patte
rdale, overlooking the shores of Ullswater, that William espied a property: the picture-book setting he’d always wanted for himself. Most Lakeland connoisseurs, to this day, would probably choose Ullswater as their favourite lake. Grasmere and Rydal, though exquisite, are too small. Buttermere is very pretty, but doesn’t have the grandeur of Ullswater. It was noticeable that when they were in Scotland, looking at every Scotsman’s pride, Loch Lomond, they should all immediately have compared it with Ullswater.
William had a look round the nineteen acres that were on sale with the little farmhouse, realized the property could be developed one day with a little money and made big enough for their household, and made an offer of £800. He thought that was a realistic price—expensive for the amount of land, but worth it to him for the situation. The owner came back at length and demanded £1,000. A local rector had entered the bidding and although Wordsworth wrote to him, asking him to witdraw, he refused and the price remained at £1,000.
William had as good as forgotten about the property, leaving the matter in the hands of a local friend, who’d put in his bid of £800 for him, when, some time later, he was suddenly informed that the little estate had been bought for him, at the asking price of £1,000. William only had £800 available and, anyway, that was all he considered it was worth. Who was the mysterious person who had made up the difference of £200? Which figure, once a dreaded name in the Wordsworth family, had now appeared as a fairy godfather? Yes, none other than Lord Lowther, soon to be made Earl of Lonsdale by a second creation in 1807, just a few months after he arranged William’s property deal.
He was the Good Earl, a distant relation of the Bad Earl. On the old Earl’s death in 1802, he’d taken over the Lowther estates and paid off the family debts to the Wordsworths. Despite this, he had been a remote figure in William’s life so far, since his return to the Lakes, and they’d never met—though, strangely enough, his name was on the guest list of one of the London routs William had attended the previous year. The Earl had obviously heard of William’s poetry and of his frugal life in Grasmere, and had decided to step in and help him when, through a mutual friend, he’d been told about William’s frustrated desire to buy the little Ullswater property. William was most embarrassed. Dorothy, to use one of her favourite words, was mortified. William was upset on account of his own frugality—upset by the fact that £1,000 had been paid for a property he thought was worth only £800. ‘I was unwilling to pay an exorbitant price out of my own money,’ he wrote to his go-between friend, Wilkinson. ‘I should be still more unwilling to pay it out of another’s, especially a person who had shown to me so much kindness, treated me with such respectful delicacy.’
The property was bought, with William and Mary each providing £400 (Mary might not have received any wedding presents from her family, but she had inherited £400) and Lord Lonsdale paying the balance of £200.
William was overwhelmed with gratitude, once he’d got over his initial embarrassment—realizing that the great landowner himself, the most powerful man in Cumberland and Westmorland, had troubled to help a struggling poet. When William called at Lowther to offer his personal thanks, the Earl was out, but William sent him a humble, not to say grovelling, letter, all about the high honour the Earl’s delicacy of mind had bestowed upon him, and ending with such a flourish that he hardly had enough space on the page to fit it all in. He usually signed himself either with his name or initials when writing to friends—or perhaps with ‘your affectionate friend’ if the acquaintanceship was less close—but in this, his first letter to Lord Lowther, he really let himself go:
My Lord,
with the greatest respect and esteem,
and the most lively sense of your kindness,
Your Lordship’s
obedient Servant,
William Wordsworth.
It was the beginning of a long—and some alas might say rather nauseating, relationship—a relationship however, which eventually did blossom into a valuable friendship.
Meanwhile, Coleridge was due to return home. The Ullswater property, delighted though the Wordsworths were with it, was really part of a long-term plan, giving them a stake in the Lakes and making William a freeholder of Westmorland as well as of Cumberland; but their immediate aim was to link up with Coleridge on his return and live near wherever he might choose to live.
Coleridge had had an excellent first year abroad, getting himself a job as an acting secretary to the Governor of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball. He did the job very well, from all accounts, learning enough Italian in just a few months to settle a seamen’s dispute and writing reports on Malta’s political and economic strategies: all this was enough to make the governor extend his tenure of the post and keep him longer than he had planned. The sun did Coleridge’s health good and he took some energetic holidays, as when he travelled across to Sicily and climbed Etna.
In the autumn of 1805, he finally left Malta and started making his way home. This was hardly the best time to start wandering round the Mediterranean. Napoleon was sweeping the sea, which he wanted to control as the last stage in his bid to master Europe, and only Nelson was holding out against him. The various blockades—with ships sinking, fighting or being captured—endangered Coleridge’s own movements and clouded his friends’ knowledge of them. No wonder they were all so worried about him in England, where nothing was heard of him for months, except for second-hand reports by people he’d met on his travels. Dorothy, no doubt thinking of John, dreamed one night that he had perished. ‘I am too often haunted with dreadful images of Shipwrecks and the Sea when I am in bed and hear a stormy wind, and now that we are thinking so much about Coleridge it is worse than ever.’ Coleridge arrived safely in Naples—which, however, wasn’t safe for long, as the Napoleonic army was advancing towards it. Coleridge maintained later that he’d been on Napoleon’s list of wanted men—which isn’t too far-fetched a claim, as he’d written several strongly anti-French articles over the years in the Morning Post. He left Naples in time and made for Rome, where he stayed for almost six months, getting as usual into all the literary and artistic circles, just as he’d done in Germany.
Coleridge’s voyage home, in an American ship, was equally hazardous, and the journey from Leghorn took thirty-nine days. He’d made friends with some American painters and writers, who had been attracted by his sympathy for the American war of Independence. Coleridge arrived back in Portsmouth in August 1806, two years and four months after he’d left England, his health just as bad as it had ever been, since the benefits of his first relaxed year in the Maltese sun had been dissipated by his subsequent wanderings and adventures.
The Wordsworths were horrified when they met him ten weeks later in Kendal. Tired of waiting to hear what his plans were, they had all set off south, to spend the winter at Sir George Beaumont’s country home at Coleorton in Leicestershire.
Never did I feel such a shock as at first sight of him [wrote Dorothy]. We all felt exactly in the same way—as if he were different from what we have expected to see; almost as much as a person of whom we have thought much, and of whom we had formed an image in our own minds, without having any personal knowledge of him.
He is utterly changed; and yet sometimes, when he was animated in conversation concerning things removed from him, I saw something of his former self… that he is ill I am well assured, and must sink if he does not grow more happy. His fatness has quite changed him—it is more like the flesh of a person in dropsy than one in health; his eyes are lost in it … the divine expression of his countenance … a shadow, a gleam there was at times, but how faint and transitory.
He has no plans for his residence, and as yet has taken no notice of anything we have said of our movements depending upon him and his. His misery has made him so weak and he has been so dismally irresolute in all things since his return to England.
The big problem was his wife. He just couldn’t face going back to her and had decided that a separation was now the only solution. The Wordsw
orths were all in favour of him trying one more time to make a success of it, while concentrating his mind on a proper literary project and settling down to work again, though they knew that he and his wife were unsuited. Coleridge’s plan was that he should be responsible for the education of his two boys, Hartley and Derwent, making a living for himself by lecturing and journalism, while his wife stayed up in Keswick with Sara, having the boys in the holidays. He hoped she could live on his Wedgwood annuity, as she’d done while he’d been abroad.
Coleridge and Hartley joined the Wordsworths at the Beaumonts’ Leicestershire estate and spent the winter with them. It turned out to be quite a success. Sarah Hutchinson, now living almost full-time with the Wordsworths, was there, which was nice for Coleridge, who settled down to some work and to regular, sober habits.
‘He does not take such strong stimulants as he did,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘but I fear he will never be able to leave them off entirely. He drinks ale at night and mid-morning and dinner time.
‘He says he will write today to Mrs Coleridge his letter of final arrangements, but I shall not depend upon him till I see the letter sealed up and directed. Poor Soul! He is sadly deficient in moral courage.’
It must have been quite dispiriting for him, to have William in the same house, showing such wonderful powers of concentration, such energy and inspiration, working away at his poems. He knew only too well that, by comparison, his creative powers had almost faded and that Sarah, who’d once loved and cared for him, now appeared to love and admire William more than she’d ever loved him. William wasn’t just working hard at his writing, but was busy landscaping and reorganizing Sir George’s estate for him, drafting enormous detailed letters about what should be done. At Coleorton, all the Wordsworths started attending the local church twice on Sundays, something they’d never done in Grasmere. William, however, was very critical of the local village preacher. ‘His sermon was, as Village sermons often are, very injudicious,’ William wrote to Sir George, who was now at his Grosvenor Square house. ‘A most knowing discourse about the Gnostics and other hard names of those who were Hadversaries to Christianity and Henemies of the Gospel. I don’t know that I ever heard in a Country pulpit a sermon that had any special bearing on the condition of the majority of the Audience. The congregation consisted almost entirely of old persons.’
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