William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  They are altogether incompetent judges [wrote William]. These people in the senseless hurry of their idle lives do not read books, they merely snatch a glance at them, that they may talk about them. Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be seen. For those who dip into books in order to give an opinion—for this multitude of unhappy and misguided and misguiding beings, an entire regeneration must be produced, and if this be possible it must be a work of time.

  William could be philosophical because, at heart, he was convinced of his own genius. ‘All men of first rate genius have been as distinguished for dignity, beauty and propriety of moral conduct,’ he wrote on one occasion—an arguable generalization, which excludes Byron but includes Wordsworth. At the time, he was actually thinking of Burns, whom he thought had been cruelly used after his death, when all his sexual behaviour was brought into the open; in a published letter about Burns he maintained the charges were mainly untrue and certainly unfair.

  But the Wordsworth family would have liked some financial rewards there and then. Living with a genius didn’t pay the rent. ‘We shall never grow rich,’ wrote Dorothy after all the reviews had come out.

  For I now perceive clearly that till my dear Brother is laid in his grave his writings will not produce any profit. This I now care no more about and shall never more trouble my head concerning the sale of them. I once thought The White Doe might have helped off the other, but I now perceive it can hardly help itself. It is a pity it was published in so expensive a form (one guinea for a slim volume) because some are thereby deprived of the pleasure of reading it; but however cheap his poems might be, I am sure it will be very long before they have an extensive sale—nay it will not be while he is alive to know it. His writings will live—will comfort the afflicted and animate the happy to purer happiness when we and our cares are all forgotten.

  THE WHITE DOE

  The first six lines of this introduction to The White Doe of Rylstone, published in 1815, were originally used in his unperformed play, The Borderers.

  ACTION is transitory—a step, a blow,

  The motion of a muscle—this way or that –

  ’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy

  We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:

  Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

  And has the nature of infirmity.

  Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem

  And irremoveable) gracious openings lie,

  By which the soul—with patient steps of thought

  Now toiling, wafted now on wings of prayer

  May pass in hope, and, though from mortal bonds

  Yet undelivered, rise with sure ascent

  Even to the fountain-head of peace divine.

  16

  Mary, Dorothy and the Children

  1813–1820

  WHILE much has been written about the possibility of an incestuous relationship between William and Dorothy, no-one appears to have given much thought to what happened after his marriage. Did it go on for ever, whatever it was that went on? Did William’s marriage to Mary make no difference? It has usually been assumed that poor Mary was assigned the role of mother and joint housekeeper, with Dorothy still continuing to be the most important person in William’s life.

  For the first ten years of the marriage, outwardly nothing much appeared to change. Mary was too busy with childbirth and children to have the time or the physical energy to attend to some of William’s other needs or interests. They married in 1802 and had five children in eight years, finishing with Willy in 1810, the year she was forty; then she lost two children in six months in 1812. For most of these ten years, when she wasn’t pregnant, she was ill and tired out, and the family letters are full of her ill health. Meanwhile, William was caught up in the excitement of his early published poems, with Dorothy beside him to take all his work down, or to go off on jaunts with him to Scotland or round the Lakes when he wanted a break, usually after the birth of another child.

  By 1813, when Mary was beginning to recover from the emotional shock of the two deaths, and the other children were beginning to grow up reasonably healthy and safe, she had more time and energy to share William’s very active life.

  It looks as if she might have had at least one miscarriage, possibly in 1813, when she was forty-three. Some members of the family had welcomed another birth, the idea being that a new baby might compensate for the loss; but in the end they were all glad when she was no longer pregnant. ‘Our domestic occupations are now comparatively few,’ wrote Dorothy in October 1813. ‘Willy goes to school—and there is no likelihood of more children to nurse; and though, if we could nurse them with the same cheerful confidence as before I should be glad that Mary were likely to have another child, I do not now wish it … there is no prospect of it.’

  She doesn’t say how they knew Mary would have no more children. Forty-three is late, but not necessarily too late, unless she’d been told by the doctor or attended to by him. William was greatly upset by the depression which Mary had gone into after the deaths of the two younger children, and did everything he could to help. In July 1814, he took Mary and Sarah to Scotland for six weeks, hoping it would improve Mary’s health, leaving Dorothy at home with the children. It would appear, from the family letters, to be the first time he’d gone on such a holiday without Dorothy for almost fifteen years.

  In 1814, Dorothy started being actively encouraged to help out people with their problems—nursing the children of friends, or being a companion to old people—a pattern that continued for many years. She was away for over three months in early 1814, nursing young Basil Montagu in Keswick; then, for three months at the end of the year, she was in Wales with Sarah. Throughout 1814, Dorothy and William spent hardly more than three months in each other’s company, a dramatic change from the previous twenty years.

  At the end of the year, William wrote to her in Wales, asking her to come home as Willy was ill. ‘Dearest Mary has been a good deal exhausted with waiting upon him, and I cannot but wish that you would come home. Mary will not consent that I should write, till we can say that the Child is quite well. It is solely to relieve Mary from fatigue—who at the best you know is not very strong.’

  William added a strange PS to this letter, which has either a hint of guilt in it or of some sort of apology which only Dorothy would understand: ‘I repeat that I have no motive for writing but an earnest wish you were at home on Dear Mary’s account, and that when I have had any anxiety I always wish for you.…’ Had Dorothy begun to feel or sense that she wasn’t needed in the household any more?

  In 1815, William and Mary went off to London, leaving Dorothy again with the children; on their return, she went off to nurse the children of Charles Lloyd. In 1816, William and Mary went to Stockton for a holiday, and then Dorothy herself went off alone to Halifax for five months.

  These long separations wouldn’t be remarkable, if they had been happening regularly in the past, or if the letters between them had still been full of the usual ‘beloved’, ‘dearest’, ‘how I miss you passionately’, ‘how long till we meet’, which had characterized all their letters in the past, when by chance fate had separated them. The letters dating from 1813 to about 1818 show very little emotion: they are about ordinary matters, with no passionate expressions of love. In fact, Dorothy is quite surprised by herself not wanting to rush back to William. She’d only intended to stay for a month with her old friends in Halifax, but the weeks had gone by and she kept on missing dates on which she’d promised to return. There was obviously nothing vital or urgent to drag her back to Rydal, not as in the old days.

  William, in his letters of this period, starts boasting about what a wonderful marriage he has: a theme he continued to dwell on for the rest of his life. ‘My marriage has been as happy as man’s could be,’ he wrote to his old West Country fr
iend Thomas Poole in April 1814.

  As Dorothy was not present to share the discovery of so many new friends, references to her start to decrease in his letters. Instead of passing on Dorothy’s activities and kind regards to a friend, it is more often Mary’s that he sends. Mary was coming into his public life more and more, while Dorothy was becoming the housekeeper. He tended to take Mary when he visited the Lowthers in their stately home, not Dorothy. Perhaps Dorothy was a little too wild and unkempt-looking for such smart company, or perhaps, when one mixes with fine folks, one’s wife is the proper companion.

  The White Doe, the poem William was personally so proud of, was fulsomely dedicated to Mary. At the beginning of this little dedication he mentions her by name:

  And, Mary! oft beside our blazing fire,

  When years of wedded life were as a day …

  Beloved Wife, such solace to impart,

  As it hath yielded to thy tender heart.

  This poem appeared in 1815, thirteen years after they had been married—quite a long time to wait before giving such a puff of wind to one’s beloved. It might or might not be significant, this pretty dedication to his wife, but it is certainly noticeable that from about 1813 Dorothy appears to have slightly faded from the mainstream of William’s life.

  It was only when reading the letters about the 1818 election, when Dorothy was suddenly right at his side again, sharing the excitements, that I realized that for the previous five years she had been banished to the wings, rarely sharing the big events in her brother’s life, not even living at Rydal for much of each year. What had happened? Had there been a change in the relationship?

  There is no sign of any row, or of any difference of opinion. It’s more a feeling in the letters of these years, rather than any facts—but a feeling which is markedly different from that in the letters of the previous years. On only one occasion is there a hint of criticism of Mary by Dorothy; even then, she is overtly praising her goodness, and it’s only by reading between the lines that one can detect that perhaps she was becoming irritated by some aspects of Mary’s character:

  We happen for the last 1/2 year to have had the worst cook in England but Mary Dawson is coming to live with us and Sarah and I intend to give her unlimited commission to cook all sorts of nice things for Mary, to which Mary will not object; for, strange it is, Mary in these little things would be far more easily ruled by a servant than by us. Thus extremes meet. The more she loves people the less attentive she is to their happiness in trifles which makes up so much of human life—but her own health is not a trifle yet that same disposition of self-sacrifice which has characterized her through her life prevents her from taking care of herself, though she sees and knows how uneasy it makes us.…

  It has to be admitted that there’s not much to go on, in building up a theory that William’s and Dorothy’s relationship had begun to cool after ten years or so of his marriage. I can’t pinpoint the date, or list any disagreements. All I can suggest is that, after being married to her for ten years, William suddenly fell passionately in love with his wife.

  Until now, there has been little hard evidence to prove that William ever loved his wife, either before or after his marriage. Very few letters between them have ever been seen. There has been nothing to suggest William didn’t love her, and, in normal circumstances, the lack of written protestations between husband and wife might not have been worth remarking on, but, with such an enormous wealth of passionate writing between William and his sister, it has always seemed strange that, by comparison, William wrote so seldom to his wife, or she to him. Coleridge, for example, wrote very affectionate letters home to his wife during the Scottish tour in 1803, despite his loss of love for her, while William apparently wrote nothing home to his wife, even though they’d been married under a year and she’d just borne their first child. It’s not surprising therefore that Mary should have been considered so far a minor figure, though it is always dangerous to build arguments on negative evidence. As with the Annette discovery, there may be vital facts yet to be unearthed, turning old theories upside down, giving the characters new roles.

  In July 1977 a collection of Wordsworth and Coleridge manuscripts and letters suddenly turned up for sale at Sotheby’s in London. They were bought by Cornell University for £38,500, but were then sold, for the same amount, to the Dove Cottage Trustees in Grasmere, who now own them. They’d been bought in a bundle of old letters for £5 by a young stamp-dealer in Carlisle. He was about to burn them, since they were useless to him, when he noticed the names ‘Wordsworth’ and ‘Rydal Mount’.

  At the time of writing, the manuscripts and letters are still being analysed and edited by the Wordsworth scholar Beth Darlington and have not yet been published—though she says that their publication will lead scholars to wrangle over how the references should be interpreted, especially those concerning the 1800-1802 period—but from my brief look at them, first at Sotheby’s and then when they were on exhibition at Dove Cottage, the most fascinating items in an enormously rich treasure trove are thirty-five letters between William and Mary.

  ‘Husband loves wife’ isn’t exactly shattering news—not like the discovery of mistress Annette in the 1920s—but it is this revelation in the letters which completely alters the traditional view of Mary. Firstly, she will now be seen to have been highly literate and intelligent. The scholars will no doubt start wondering if she, and not Dorothy, could have provided the inspiration for the Lucy poems and other love poems. William always gave Mary credit for having thought of the best two lines in ‘Daffodils’ (‘They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude’), and boasted about it on several occasions, but this always seemed an isolated example of her influence on his poetry, as if he was just mentioning it to humour her, or to give her some sense of status and importance.

  Secondly, the letters show William to have been very passionate, in itself a rare enough phenomenon. There are no love-letters from him to Annette, although there is internal evidence of his love in her letters, and even in the relationship with Dorothy, most of the passionate sentiments were from Dorothy’s pen. William has gone down to posterity as a rather stern, unbending figure—an image which he himself did little to alter in his middle and later years. De Quincey’s remark about his face revealing ‘animal passions’ has always been rather puzzling. De Quincey never knew about Annette, and was sure that William could never subjugate himself to any woman. De Quincey knew William best in the early years of his marriage, when Mary was chiefly concerned with child-bearing.

  William is certainly swept along by passion in the newly discovered letters, such as in the following one, written to Mary in May 1812, when they were both forty-two. He was in London at the time, having gone to see Coleridge. He’d travelled down as far as Chester with Mary, leaving her to go on to Wales to stay with her brother.

  How I long (again I must say) to be with thee; every hour of absence now is a grievous loss, because we have been parted sufficiently to feel how profoundly in soul and body we love each other; and to be taught what a sublime treasure we possess in each other’s love—the fever of thought and longing and affection and desire is strengthening in me, and I am sure will … make me wakeful … and consume me. I think of you by the waters, and under the shades of the Wye; I felt for thee … as an expecting bride … what thou hast been, from the hour of our first walks near Penrith till our last parting at Chester, and till this very moment when I am writing, and Thou most probably out thinking of me and losing all sense of the motion of the horse that bears thee. Oh my beloved, but I ought not to trust myself to this senseless and visible sheet of paper; speak for me to thyself; find the evidence of what is passing within me in thy heart, in thy mind, in thy steps as they touch the green grass, in thy limbs as they are stretched upon the soft earth; and in such kisses as I often give to the empty air, and in the aching of thy bosom, and let a voice speak for me in everything within thee and without thee … oh what an age seems i
t till we shall be again together, under the shades of the green trees, by the rippling of the waters, and in that hour which thou lovest the most, the silence the vacancy and the impenetrable gloom of night. Ah, Mary, I must turn my pen from this course.…

  Mary, in her letters, is equally passionate. The date of this next letter from her to William, is not clear (not to me, anyway), but it could have been written sometime in 1812 or 1813, when William was away on business. ‘Dorothy’, in the first sentence, is doubtless their daughter Dora, and the ‘D’ later on is sister Dorothy.

  Dorothy has asked me more than once, when she has found me this morning with thy letter in my hand, what I was crying about. I told her that I was so happy—but she could not comprehend this. Indeed, my love, it has made me supremely blessed—it has given me a new feeling, for it is the first letter of love that has been exclusively my own—Wonder not then that I have been so affected by it, Dearest William!… that you cannot fully enjoy your absence from me, indeed, William, I feel; I have felt that you cannot, but it overpowers me to be told it by your own pen. I was much moved by the lines written with your hand in one of D’s letters, where you spoke of coming home thinking you ‘would be of great use’ to me—indeed, my love, then you would, but I did not want thee so much then, as I do now that our uncomfortableness is passed away—if you had been here, no doubt there would have existed in me that inner consciousness that I had my all-in-all about me; that feeling which I have never wanted since the solitary night did not separate us, except in absence; but I had not then that leisure which I ought to have and which is necessary to be actively alive to so rich a possession and to the full enjoyment of it—I do, William, and shall to the end of my life consider the sacrifice as a dear offering of thy love; I feel it to be such, and I am grateful to thee for it, but trust that it will be the last of the kind that we shall need to make.…