William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  Richard was the second Wordsworth brother to die, but there was nothing like the intensity of grief that had been caused by the dreadful tragedy of John, the sailor brother, eleven years previously. For it was then that the original ‘set’ had been broken. Now, William and Mary had their own little set, each with a devoted sister in tow, all looking after their own brood, who were growing up healthy and happy—even if there were a few qualms, a few disappointments and a few possible worries for the future.

  SHE WAS A PHANTOM OF DELIGHT

  One of Wordsworth’s love poems, published in the 1807 collection. It is not known if he had Mary or Dorothy or anyone else in mind. He describes it as a Poem of Imagination.

  SHE was a Phantom of delight

  When first she gleamed upon my sight;

  A lovely Apparition, sent

  To be a moment’s ornament;

  Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;

  Like Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair;

  But all things else about her drawn

  From May-time and the cheerful Dawn;

  A dancing Shape, in Image gay,

  To haunt, to startle, and way-lay.

  And now I see with eye serene

  The very pulse of the machine;

  A Being breathing thoughtful breath,

  A Traveller between life and death;

  The reason firm, the temperate will,

  Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;

  A perfect Woman, nobly planned,

  To warn, to comfort and command;

  And yet a Spirit still and bright

  With something of angelic light.

  17

  Friends and Relations

  1813–1820

  AFTER a shaky start, the other literary establishment across at Greta Hall in Keswick was flourishing greatly, and Robert Southey, sole male head of the Southey-Coleridge clan, achieved popularity and eminence before Wordsworth when he’d become Poet Laureate in 1813. They hadn’t been close friends in the early days; perhaps they had even been unspoken rivals, though that bad review by Southey of Lyrical Ballads had been inspired in part by spite against his brother-in-law Coleridge, as they’d recently fallen out over pantisocracy.

  Over the years, Wordsworth and Southey had grown much closer, in their lives and in their characters, each becoming more Tory and reactionary, their republican days long behind them. As people, they grew to become genuine friends. They comforted each other in family grief; but, most of all, they were brought together by their respective offspring. The Coleridge children were constantly with the Wordsworths, for weeks on end, the Southey children usually joined them, and they all paid each other return visits. The daughters of the three poets turned out to be each other’s best friends.

  Southey hadn’t really wanted to come to the Lakes. He’d put off Coleridge’s entreaties for a couple of years, hoping something else would turn up—going to Dublin for a spell as a minor civil servant, then ending up back at home in Bristol, though still looking for some sort of paid job to keep him going. It was the death of his first child, Margaret, in 1803 that suddenly made him take up Coleridge’s offer: he couldn’t face the Bristol house any more and he thought his wife and Mrs Coleridge would provide sisterly comfort for each other. Even so, for the first few years in Keswick he was still hoping for a nice overseas appointment, particularly one in Portugal, his first love.

  It turned out to be a watershed in his life—arriving in the Lakes after eight years of wandering, with different jobs and different homes. He suddenly revealed the most enormous willpower and single-minded concentration, qualities hidden until that moment, and for the next forty years lived in the Lakes, devoting himself to his pen and to being a parent. You often find hints in his letters that he might have been subjugating some deep passion, some yearning to wander off again; but the clues are slight and he did become the model Victorian patriarch.

  His reputation as a poet was based on five epic poems, all now unread, starting with Joan of Arc back in 1796, which Charles Lamb said marked him as the greatest living poet. His most admired epic was The Curse of Kehama (1810), loved by all the new young poets, such as Keats, Shelley and Byron.

  Unlike Wordsworth, who saw himself only as a poet, pure and simple, Southey had two other literary occupations which increasingly took over his working life. He’d been a hack reviewer since his early days, along with Coleridge, accepting every little book review commission that came his way; but now he grew into a journalist of great importance, writing long essays and articles on the subjects of the day. In 1809 he began writing regularly for the Quarterly Review; at the height of his fame he was being paid £100 an article, an enormous sum for those days. (Most of today’s literary magazines still don’t pay as highly.) The Edinburgh Review tried to tempt him away—which he knew would be good for his own books, as the magazine’s reviewers would be bound to be kinder to him—but naturally, being a man of honour, he couldn’t go over to the enemy and turned the offer down. In 1817 he was offered the equally large sum of £2,000 a year to write for The Times. Crabb Robinson, friend to all the Lake Poets, was the intermediary, and it seems possible that they might even have been going to offer him the editorship, as the owner of The Times, John Walter, had just sacked his editor, and Southey was much respected by the ruling Tory government. But Southey turned them down too, not wishing to leave the Lakes. By this time, his earnings from his own writings, which he worked at almost round the clock, were probably about £2,000 anyway. Wordsworth, by comparison, was at this time lucky to average £20 a year from his poetry.

  Southey’s other source of income was non-fiction. His passion for Portugal turned into a three-volume history of Brazil, the first one of that country; but he never got his history of Portugal itself finished. He wrote other historical books, including one on the Peninsular War, but his speciality was biography; his Life of Nelson did much to confirm Nelson as a public hero.

  In his day, it was Southey’s prose style that was chiefly admired. Even Wordsworth, who never publicly praised Southey’s poetry, even when he became an intimate friend, enormously enjoyed Southey’s prose, as everyone did. Byron called it perfect and Hazlitt said it could ‘scarcely be too much praised’. It is forgotten now that while Wordsworth was setting out to free English poetry from gaudiness and inane phraseology, English prose was also suffering from the convoluted but empty elegance of the eighteenth-century manner.

  Southey worked like a demon at each of his writing activities, turning himself into a positive industry. Over at Rydal, when William was in one of his fallow periods, preoccupied with politics, travelling or family affairs, they often wished he was as creative as Southey.

  William is quite well [wrote Dorothy to Mrs Clarkson in 1821], though he has not looked at The Recluse or the poem of his own life, and this disturbs us. After fifty years of age, there is no time to spare, and unfinished works should not, if it be possible, be left behind. This he feels, but the will never governs his labours. How different from Southey, who can go as regularly as clockwork, from history to poetry, from poetry to criticism, and so on to biography, or anything else. If their minds could each spare a little to the other, how much better for both!

  Southey had to work so hard because he had so many people to support by his writings alone. There were, firstly, the three Coleridge children he inherited: Hartley, Derwent and Sara; he then went on to produce eight children of his own, though two died in infancy. After a run of six girls, he had a longed-for son, Herbert, who turned out to be another child prodigy in the house, almost as clever as Hartley, knowing Greek, French, German and Latin by the time he was nine. He died, aged ten, in 1815, a shock which greatly upset Southey and his wife, and all in the Wordsworth household, who offered to do anything they could to help. Sarah Hutchinson was the universal aunt for both households. In turn, she ministered to the needs of the three poets. After Coleridge had left, she went on to act for long spells as a secretary or just a living-
in friend for the Southeys, when she wasn’t doing the same for the Wordsworths. At Rydal Mount, as at Greta Hall, whenever there was a domestic upset, the cry was the same: ‘Send for Sarah.’

  The Southeys had a final child—a son, Cuthbert—in 1819, when Mrs Southey was forty-seven, which brought the total number of children in the house back to eight. Then there were the adults. A third Fricker sister, Mrs Lovell (widow of Robert Lovell, the young writer who was also in the pantisocracy scheme), came to the Lakes with the Southeys, though Coleridge had advised them to pension her off. She not only stayed, but outlived them all. That meant twelve permanent mouths to feed, plus many regular and impecunious visitors. There were two more Fricker sisters, maiden aunts called Martha and Eliza, who were regular guests. Southey’s joke was that Greta Hall was an ant-hill—not just because of his ferocious activity, but because every lady was somebody’s aunt.

  Southey, in effect, had three wives—just like Wordsworth. His wife, Mrs Coleridge and Mrs Lovell all supported him as best they could and looked to him as master of the house.

  A mutual friend, a Miss Barker, who lived in Keswick, said that both Wordsworth and Southey were spoiled by their three wives, ‘but that Wordsworth’s were much preferable to Southey’s’. The Fricker sisters, on the whole, do seem to have been rather dreary, depressing ladies, and nobody, in all the memoirs, has a good word to say for them, compared with Dorothy and the Hutchinson sisters, who are constantly being praised. Both households had friends in common, such as Crabb Robinson, Humphry Davy and Walter Scott, and most people new to the Lakes tried to visit both establishments on their tour, if they wanted to boast, as everyone did, that they’d seen the Lake Poets.

  Coleridge has left the worst testimony against his wife Sara; but then he would, blaming her for many of his own failings. ‘If anyone wanted an exact and copious recipe, “How to make a Husband completely miserable” I could furnish her with one,’ wrote Coleridge. ‘Ill tempered Speeches sent after me when I went out of the House, ill tempered speeches on my return, my friends received with freezing looks, the least opposition or contradiction received with screams of passion—all this added to the utter negation of all of which a Husband expects from a wife.’ Dorothy had been equally against Sara in the early days, but they all came to like her more, as she blossomed after Coleridge had left.

  Southey joined the chorus which agreed that Wordsworth was a lucky man, adding a rather personal but mysterious comment on his own circumstances. ‘No man was ever more fortunate in wife, sister or sister in law than he has been,’ Southey wrote to a lady friend about Wordsworth. ‘There is no woman out of my own house (except one whom I shall not name to you) with whom I am so intimate as Miss Hutchinson, or whom I love altogether so well.’ What could that possibly mean? He could have meant Sara Coleridge, except she had married and left home; or perhaps her mother. Did he prefer Mrs Coleridge to his own wife? There was always a slight suggestion that he and Coleridge had originally married the wrong sisters.

  De Quincey, in his Recollections of the Lake Poets, has left rather a dour picture of Southey, locked away in his library, with his fourteen thousand books, always charming and courteous to meet, but his mind always half on his work, perhaps a nicer man than Wordsworth, but far less inspiring. He was five feet eleven inches tall, an inch taller than Wordsworth, according to De Quincey, as well as being better dressed and more presentable. From his portraits, Southey does appear much the handsomer, finer figure. Byron, at his early meeting with Southey, was impressed both by his poetry and his appearance: ‘The best looking bard I have seen for some time. To have that poet’s head and shoulders, I would almost have written his Sapphics. His appearance is epic and he is the only existing entire man of letters.’

  One of the best Southey-Wordsworth gatherings—and they had many picnics, expeditions and tours together—was held in 1815, to celebrate Waterloo. Each was now a confirmed French-hater, having lost all republican zeal. Southey organized a triumphant ascent of Skiddaw, with a great party on top and a massive bonfire. Most of Southey’s own family were there, plus William, Mary and Dorothy from Rydal; several local lords and lordlings; friends and children, and three maids to serve the feast, all of whom were followed up the mountain by ‘Messrs. Rag, Tag and Bobtail’.

  At the top, they had roast beef, plum pudding and punch, and sang ‘God Save the King’ round a bonfire made of tar barrels. Blazing balls of tow and turpentine were rolled down the mountain side for extra effects. ‘We formed a huge circle round the intense light,’ wrote one guest later, ‘and behind us was an immeasurable arch of the most intense darkness, for our bonfire fairly put out the moon.’ They didn’t get back to Keswick till after midnight, by which time some of the Messrs Rag, Tag and Bobtail were happily drunk. Mrs Coleridge hadn’t gone with them, but had stayed at home with some of the younger children: ‘I had a very anxious time during the nine hours of their absence for I feared lest the mists should come on and so keep them on the heights all night. Not a cloud came to distress them and not one of the party were any worse for the expedition.’

  Southey welcomed all visitors, despite his crowded writing schedule, and answered all letters, giving help to every unknown who wrote. He had a long correspondence with a lady called Caroline Bowles, who sent him some poems which he not only helped to edit but for which he found her a publisher. (It was to Miss Bowles he wrote the letter about the ladies of his household.) Another letter from an unknown was one signed C. Brontë—a name he mistook for a pseudonym, as it looked so odd—enclosing some verse for his comments. In his rather discouraging reply he told her that marriage was a woman’s proper career: ‘The day dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind, and in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else. Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not to be.’ However, he ended on a kinder note. ‘Farewell madam. It is not because I have forgotten that I was once young myself that I write to you in this strain, but because I remember it.… Though I may be an ungracious adviser, you will allow me, therefore, to subscribe myself, with the best wishes for your happiness here and hereafter, your true friend, Robert Southey.’

  When this letter turned up at a saleroom about seventy years later, Charlotte Brontë was found to have endorsed the letter with the following words: ‘Southey’s advice to be kept for ever. My twenty-first birthday. Roe Head, April 21, 1837.’

  The better established young writers had introductions and were entertained at Greta Hall. One such was Shelley, who in 1811 had run away to Keswick with his child bride, and lived there for six months. He’d hoped to see Wordsworth as well, but didn’t manage it. He was an admirer of both of them, describing Southey’s Kehama as his ‘most favourite poem’. He was received by Southey, taken round the house, and shown all his books, but not allowed to handle them himself. Southey didn’t approve of that. Afterwards, Shelley decided Southey was a reactionary old bore, and they later carried on a violent quarrel in letters, after Shelley had wrongly thought Southey had given him a bad review.

  Southey did rather go in for acrimonious correspondence with other writers, often for the sport, and to exercise his journalistic muscles, though the issue was sometimes very serious. Like Wordsworth, who was branded with Southey as a turncoat, lost to politics and poetry, he particularly hated Byron and christened his writing the ‘Satanic School of Poetry’. Byron and he had a typically convoluted literary row, in private and in published articles and verse, with accusations flying around. It ended with Byron challenging Southey to a duel, but his second never delivered the challenge.

  Byron scored the most points in this public argument with Southey and Wordsworth—much to the amusement of all the young wits, who enjoyed his satirical verses in Don Juan, where he names the guilty men of his generation (and, incidentally, in passing, makes clear the correct pronunciation
of Southey):

  Thou shall believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope,

  Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey,

  Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,

  The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy.

  In another stanza of Don Juan, which started to appear in the 1820s, Byron did a very clever parody of one of Southey’s own poems, copying the metre exactly:

  For pantisocracy he once had cried

  Aloud, a scheme less moral than ’t was clever

  Then grew a hearty anti-jacobin

  Had turned his coat—and would have turned his skin.

  By the 1820s, both Lakeland poets were long-confirmed Tories, so you can imagine Southey’s outrage when, in 1817, a republican, Jacobin play he’d written twenty years earlier, which had never been performed, was suddenly on sale in the London streets. It was about Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, and very soon had sold sixty thousand copies at threepence a time. Southey tried to obtain a court injunction to stop the sale, but failed; he took this rather stoically, despite attacks on him in the House of Commons. One MP accused the Poet Laureate of being a secret renegade and purveyor of sedition. The Whigs made great capital by pointing out, as they always did with Wordsworth, how he had changed sides: at first welcoming the Revolution, then turning against it. Southey’s reply to his critics was a good example of his polished prose: ‘They had turned their faces towards the east in the morning to worship the rising sun, and in the evening they were looking eastwards still, obstinately affirming that still the sun was there. I, on the contrary, altered my position as the world went round.’

  Wordsworth thought Southey was now ‘completely triumphant … for a more disinterested and honourable man than Robert Southey does not breathe’. Many years later, Southey included the drama in a collection of his works, this time without apologies, saying that he was no more ‘ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a boy.’