William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  They might of course have been sending such tender letters to each other all their lives, but it is unlikely, considering that these newly discovered ones, written in their forties, are the only ones which exist. Mary’s remark about it being ‘the first letter of love’ is an indication of their rarity. Their early teenage love in Penrith which, we have to assume (despite the lack of much evidence), certainly faded for many years during all William’s wanderings—perhaps it was caused by some sort of disagreement. Their renewed courtship and subsequent marriage appear sudden and mysterious with no letters like these to indicate any passion. Altogether, Mary’s letter is most intriguing. What is the ‘uncomfortableness’ that has passed away? Could it have been her fear of pregnancy which came between them, causing him to make ‘the sacrifice’ for which she is now so grateful? Or was it connected with the deaths of their children?

  There are no similarly passionate letters from later in their life—or earlier—but one of these days more might turn up. In the meantime, from the evidence so far, the passion first appears in letters written after ten years or so of marriage. It is obvious that they have settled down to a very happy middle age, joined in domestic bliss, enjoying a marriage of deep spiritual, imaginative and physical intimacy, with moments approaching ecstasy—experiencing a love which may even have grown stronger, if anything, as the years went on, judging by William’s continuing references to his happy marriage and his delight in his wife’s company.

  A great deal of the domestic bliss revolved around the children—not only for William and Mary, but for Dorothy too—though there were moments of alarm and several periods of constant worry. As they’d lost two children so quickly and so suddenly, it was to be expected that the parents should grow nervous at every loss of appetite, every sign of paleness.

  It was William, particularly, who fretted and clucked whenever one of them was ill. By comparison, he himself was healthier and stronger than any of his children. He was rarely ill—apart from trouble with his eyes, which started in his late thirties and became more serious as he grew older (it appears to have been trachoma, a disease which spread in England with the return of the soldiers from the Napoleonic wars). His healthy, spartan diet and his long walks obviously helped to keep him fit. You don’t hear so much about that poetic pain in his side, as he grew older and more successful.

  John, their eldest child, was ten when they moved to Rydal, and he went to a local school in Ambleside, along with the Coleridge boys. (William would have liked his sons to have gone to his old school in Hawkshead instead, but he didn’t approve of the new headmaster or of their new system.) His education was always a source of concern and they were all impatient at his academic slowness. They had such high hopes, probably too high, and he in turn tried hard for their sake, but with little success. They kept telling friends and relations how nice a boy he was, so popular and happy, but their disappointment is obvious.

  John goes to Ambleside school with Hartley and Derwent [wrote Dorothy in 1812]. He walks every morning and returns at night with a bottle over his shoulder and a basket in his hand. He always meets us with smiles, enjoys school, his play with his school fellows, and is never tired in Body, a proof that he is so strong. The thought of his strength strikes now suddenly upon me many and many a time, and my heart is humbled and I fear the more because he is so strong. As to his lessons, he is the backwardest Boy I ever knew, yet I am convinced he is not a dunce in soul.

  Two years later, she decided he was a dunce: ‘… certainly the greatest dunce in England, yet I am confident that if the difficulty of learning were once got over he would have great pleasure in Books. He has an excellent memory and his attention never sleeps when anyone is reading to him.’

  William himself was equally critical, using much the same language: ‘John is for book attainment the slowest child almost I ever knew. He has an excellent judgement and well regulated affections, but I am disappointed in my expectations of retracing Latin and Greek classics with him. Incredible pain has been taken with him, but he is to this day a deplorably bad reader of English even.’ They decided to make him a boarder at Ambleside, which his father thought would help to make him a better scholar, but it failed to get him into the public school of their choice, Charterhouse.

  William had rather enlightened views on education, for those days. He was against learning by rote and against cramming, and disapproved of those who made a virtue out of encyclopaedic knowledge. He preferred the imagination to be inspired and encouraged and the whole person developed; and he uses many of his poems to give us the benefit of his views on education. But he was nonetheless a product of his times and, when it came to his own children, he knew that the Classics and mathematics were vital for entry into Oxford or Cambridge and that the children would therefore have to get down to serious book learning. He’d long forgotten about his own revolt against such disciplines, as he constantly lectured John on the need to improve his grasp of the Classics. He spent a great deal of time teaching John at home, but John’s shyness and slowness made William impatient and irrritated, which didn’t help either of them. In 1820, however, he got John into the grammar school at Sedbergh. (It was in a part of Yorkshire which is now in Cumbria, and is still a well-known school.)

  William was soon writing to his old friends and contacts at Cambridge, hoping he could ease John’s path to university, though the Sedbergh staff pointed out that John’s slowness at mathematics gave him little chance of getting into Cambridge.

  There’s an air of sadness about John. You don’t hear so much about his smiling face as he approaches his late teens. A large number of family letters are devoted to his lack of academic ability, and though his parents would surely never have called him a dunce to his face, he must have known their thoughts. William saw around him the brilliant Coleridge boys, especially Hartley—children from a broken home, with no devoted father taking such pains—and no doubt he drew unfair comparisons. John’s shyness forced him somewhat into William’s shadow: ever eager to do his best as the eldest, carrying the family name, but unable to please his father. Even worse, a sense of fear on John’s part entered their relationship.

  Dora was very different. If anything, she was too clever and too quick, easily bored and distracted, but she was witty and lively and a great source of pleasure to the whole family. Catherine, the one who died at four, was equally lively and amusing, and even at two years old, she enchanted her parents with her sense of humour. Dorothy, when she was sending out strands of her hair to relations after her death, was still remembering her laughter.

  They were fortunate therefore with Dora, their only surviving daughter; in her personality and in her talents. It is obvious why she was, from the beginning, William’s favourite, though she too caused them many worries. Even when she was only six, they recognized her good and her bad points. ‘Dorothy is a delightful girl,’ wrote Dorothy, in 1810. ‘Clever, entertaining and lively, indeed so very lively that it is impossible for her to satisfy the activity of her spirit without a little naughtiness at times—a waywardness of fancy rather than of temper.’ Two years later, Dorothy was complaining that Dora was turning out rather bossy and self-willed: ‘I am sorry to tell you that we still have much trouble with Dorothy. She can do anything but she is extremely wayward and is desirous to master everybody. She has been with me two hours and a half this morning and has been very good and industrious—but sometimes we have terrible Battles—and long confinements. I hope that perseverance may conquer her, and that the sense will in time come that it is wiser not to make herself miserable.’

  Dora did go for a while to day-school at Ambleside, but for long periods she was taught at home by Dorothy. William’s attempts to teach John at home rather broke his son’s spirit; but, though Dorothy had many little battles with Dora, her spirit was never cowed. She was always going on about Dora’s need for firm discipline, convinced that a good school would knock her into shape. William, knowing how quick and clever she was, wished
she would give her mind more to her lessons: ‘She is very careless and inattentive, but capable of learning rapidly would she give her mind to it.’

  Dorothy also helped with Dora’s physical well-being, and had a little more success with that. It was decided by the local doctor, Mr Scrambler, that what was needed to buck you up for a Cumbrian winter was an all-over cold-water wash every morning. Dorothy describes how Dora, never being a healthy-looking child, was therefore forced to conform and received the cold-water treatment every morning.

  We had one terrible struggle with her, but she now likes it and I hope we shall have no more difficulty about the matter. Dorothy’s temper is very obstinate by fits and at such times nothing but rigorous confinement can subdue her. She is not to be moved by the feelings and the misfortune is that the more indulgence or pleasure she has, the more unmanageable she is. Yet she is affectionate in the extreme and patient and docile whenever she is called upon to perform the duty of attending upon the sick or helping to nurse.

  When Dora was fourteen, the ladies of the house at last persuaded William to let her board at the school in Ambleside, where she stayed happily for three years, coming home for weekends. When she left, in 1821, they gave a little coming-out ball for her, which the ‘beauty and the fashion’ of the neighbourhood attended. Dora wasn’t a beauty—though, in the painting of her which survives, done when she was twenty-five, she looks attractive, with enormous blue eyes. ‘She is a fine looking girl,’ Dorothy had written when Dora was twelve. ‘At times her face is very plain, at other times it is even beautiful. She is rather stout and tall—but neither in the extreme—holds her head up well, has a broad chest and good shoulders, but walks and runs most awkwardly. Vanity she has little or none, and is utterly free from envy.’

  All in all, Dora’s was a most engaging personality, with signs of William’s own youthful obstinacy and wilfulness, but without his recklessness. As she was a girl, her opportunities for wildness were limited. There was no chance of her being allowed to go walking across Europe. Her chances of a career were even more restricted. So she did what most girls did: being a dutiful daughter, she returned home after her school-days were over and waited for something to happen. William of course was delighted. He loved Dora dearly, dreamed about her and wrote poems about her. She loved him in turn, though without any of that cloying sentimentality that her aunt had once shown towards William, nor with a blind reverence of her Father the Poet. She could tease and jolly him along, poke fun at him and his foibles, and was a lively and interesting companion in almost every circumstance. Lucky William: he now had four ladies at home, looking after his needs.

  Then there was little Willy. Like big brother John, he inherited the Wordsworth nose, which was commented on in all the letters immediately after his birth. He was also like John in having little natural aptitude for his lessons—though John did at least try hard, and his parents always had hopes that he would turn out a scholar in the end, as he seemed interested in books. Willy, alas, was neither interested nor capable.

  Little Willy—am I glad to give him that title for it makes me sad sometimes when I think how we are losing the others as children—is a very sweet and interesting child [wrote Dorothy in 1816, when Willy was six]. He is backward at his books, for he has only just begun to learn at all, but he is now under a new Master, his Father’s clerk [John Carter, who helped William with the Stamps], and his progress is rapid. All at once under him he became steady, whereas his mother, his aunt Sarah and I, have all by turns undertaken him and we could make nothing out. The lesson was the signal for yawning and for perpetual motion in one part of the body or another.

  Willy too went eventually to the school in Ambleside, walking there daily, but without showing much promise in his lessons. As the baby of the family, the one they were sad to see growing up, as Dorothy commented, he was made a great fuss of by everybody and was particularly spoiled by William. He was still only a toddler when the two others had died, so naturally they had feared for him most. Mary at the time was very morbid, feeling sure they might lose yet another baby: a feeling that comes through in Dorothy’s letters as well.

  But soon the ladies of the household thought William overdid his fussing, making Willy worse and more spoiled than ever. ‘It would distress you to see how a pale look of that child has the power to disturb his father,’ wrote Sarah in 1815, when Willy was five. ‘He will scarcely suffer the wind of heaven to come near him and watches him the day through.’ At the age of seven, according to Dorothy, William was still treating him like a baby:

  Really, his Father fondles over him and talks to him just as if he were but a year old. I am astonished with his babyishness; He has however so fine a temper from nature that I think it is utterly impossible to undo it and by degrees he will be recovered from all leanings towards being treated as the little pet, ‘the little darling’; for when he is amongst his school fellows none are more active, independent and manly than he and he disdains all notice from Father.

  The ladies got him away from William’s clutches in the end, getting him into Charterhouse in 1821, when he was eleven; but he stayed there for only a year, thanks to idleness and ill health. He came back to Rydal and spent the next six years at home. Hartley Coleridge, after leaving Oxford, gave him lessons at the Ambleside school for a time; this wasn’t very satisfactory, for, as Dorothy remarked, Hartley wasn’t exactly a disciplinarian. Hartley in turn didn’t think much of Willy. ‘Little Will’, he said, ‘is a bore.’

  By 1822, the Wordsworth children had each in their different ways finished their main schooling. John was nineteen and about to leave Sedbergh—shy and slow, but hoping for some sort of university place, though his chances were not high. Dorothy, aged eighteen, was settled at home, her school-days over—a lively young lady, though none too strong and becoming increasingly liable to illness. (It looks as if, from this time, she was in the early stages of tuberculosis.) Little Willy, aged twelve, was back at home—still supposedly being schooled, but having proved the worst predictions about his being spoiled and lazy to be true. Dora wrote a joke advertisement about Willy in a home-made newspaper which she produced with a friend on holiday at Morecambe Bay in 1825: ‘Wants a Situation: A youth of about 15 years of age. He is able to do any kind of work, but prefers sitting to standing, riding to walking and lying in bed to anything in the world.’

  The general air of domestic bliss, which had continued untrammelled now for ten years, was helped by the fact that the Wordsworths had been spared any more illnesses as the children grew up. But, though their immediate family as a whole suffered no tragedies, their near relations and friends had several misfortunes.

  William’s younger brother Christopher, the clever one, lost his wife Priscilla in 1815. She’d just given birth to her sixth child, a still-born girl who was born after twenty-four hours of ‘tremendous sufferings’, so Dorothy wrote. The five children so far had all been boys, though two of them had died in infancy after convulsions. Priscilla was the sister of Charles Lloyd, William’s near neighbour and old friend. At about the same time Lloyd himself became insane and was taken into a mental home in Birmingham, accompanied for most of the journey by William. This was when Dorothy went to stay with Mrs Lloyd and her eight children, to help out. William similarly offered Dorothy’s services to Christopher on his bereavement, but Christopher said he would try to manage on his own.

  Christopher was left in his large Lambeth rectory, with three young boys to bring up on his own. He never remarried, but it didn’t affect his career. In 1820 he was made Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a great honour, which impressed the whole Wordsworth family. His three boys turned out to be equally clever, unlike William’s two sons, and they all went on to have distinguished academic careers. William had never been particularly close to his brother Christopher, but after Priscilla’s death their relationship became much closer and warmer.

  William had always been even less close to Richard, the eldest Wordsworth brother.
He and Dorothy were still upset that Richard never came to visit them, especially now that he had a young baby they would liked to have seen. He continued to handle all the family affairs, was their banker and investor and looked after their Lowther monies, and so, when he fell ill in 1816, William was greatly alarmed. They had forgiven him for marrying the young, supposedly vulgar servant girl two years previously, but were furious to discover that a man with his responsibilities had not yet made a will or any provisions for his and the family’s financial affairs. William became obsessed by all the awful things that could happen through lack of proper documents—just as he had fretted all those years previously when his benefactor Raisley Calvert was ill: ‘There is much reason to regret that he has not made a will and appointed Guardians for his child, especially considering the situation of life from which his wife was taken and the great probability of her returning by a second marriage into that class.’ William was mainly worrying about the mess he and Dorothy might be landed in, and his letters show him in a rather unattractive light, worrying chiefly about his own finances while his brother lay desperately ill. In the event, Richard did die, at the age of forty-seven, at Christopher’s house in London in May 1816. William had intended to come and visit him several times, getting as far as Kendal on one occasion; but, for various reasons, he never actually managed to see Richard, and was consumed with remorse after his brother’s death.

  His worries were proved correct. Though Richard did manage to make a will in time, and William and Christopher were appointed guardians of his only child, a son, the family’s finances were in a terrible mess. It took William almost the whole of the next year to sort them out. What with that, and all his political activities in connection with the Westmorland election, he didn’t write a line of poetry for almost two years.