William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  If the Wat Tyler incident was a nasty trick, his enthusiasm for the Tories was to lead him unwittingly into another embarrassing situation in 1826. An admirer of his, the Earl of Radnor, a Tory feudal lord with Lonsdale-style power in the West Country, put him forward as an MP for Wiltshire, for a seat he controlled. Unfortunately, the letter in which the earl told Southey what he’d done arrived when Southey was abroad on an extensive tour of the Low Countries. Southey arrived back in Keswick, to find the town band out in the street, waiting to greet the new M P. ‘The whole posse of the place had assembled to see what alteration dignity had produced in my stature and appearance.’

  The town was full of rumours, Southey said. According to one, he was now wealthy and worth £6,000 a year; according to another, he’d predicted the end of the world on Thursday last. He turned down the honour of being an MP, which he couldn’t have accepted anyway, as he was the recipient of a Crown pension.

  Although Wordsworth and Southey had both become high Tories, Southey never went round begging the favours of the Tory lords. Southey, as much as Wordsworth, was indebted to Lord Lonsdale, who was one of the influential people who supported his name for the Laureateship and helped with his pension; but Southey did no spying or genuflecting in return. He would appear to have been uncorrupted by his rising success and his contact with the powerful. Both writers had by now certainly risen. The two Lake Poets were confirmed in their political and social attitudes and were united as dear friends and neighbours for the rest of their lives.

  In 1817, William asked Southey to do him a favour. He knew that his friend was going on a trip to Europe and would be in Paris. He would be extremely grateful if Southey, while in Paris, could just somehow manage to look up a certain young lady, a girl called Caroline, as a personal service. William, so Southey related, had told him that ‘it would not be necessary nor pleasant to myself to be acquainted with the story of Caroline’s birth’.

  Southey duly met Caroline in Paris. As soon as she realized that Mr Southey was such a close friend and dear neighbour of Mr Wordsworth, she blurted out the full story, telling him how William came to be her father. They had a tête-à-tête for about an hour, with Caroline having a good weep. Next day, Southey had breakfast with her and her mother Annette. He was very impressed by their love for William and by their lack of any resentment.

  William must have known the full story would come out, which shows how he trusted and respected Southey. After all, not many friends knew about William’s French relations (although Crabb Robinson had been told). It is not known whether any of William’s legitimate children were ever told, though they may have found out.

  Contact with Annette had of course been lost during the war against Napoleon, but letters had started coming through again in 1814, when Napoleon resigned his throne. They’d also made personal contact when a young French officer, named Eustace Baudouin, a friend of Annette’s family, visited the Wordsworths at Rydal Mount. He’d been a prisoner of war, captured by the English, and he brought first-hand news of how Annette and her daughter had fared during the long war. Like the Wordsworths, they were delighted by the end of Napoleon, as they were still staunch royalists and hoped for the return of the Bourbons—and perhaps also for some recognition, such as a pension, for all their dangerous work in helping royalist supporters.

  In 1814, Caroline, now twenty-one, became engaged to Baudouin’s brother, Jean Baptiste, who was thirty-three and a minor civil servant. The letters were flowing freely between Rydal and Paris, where Annette and her daughter now lived. William was apparently a little worried by Baudouin’s financial position, and was concerned whether he would have enough money to support Caroline, but he gave his consent to the wedding. It’s interesting to note that the proprieties were kept, despite their lack of contact for well over ten years. William hadn’t written any letters, as far as is known, and even now, with his daughter about to get married, it was Dorothy who did all the corresponding. Annette would appear to have been the one most determined to keep up the contact—proud of her one-time English lover, and not ashamed of being called Madame William, nor of Caroline having an absentee father, now married to someone else.

  Dorothy and Sarah made plans to attend the wedding—there was no sign of William wanting to go—but Sarah worried about travelling with no male companions and Dorothy wondered if it might not be better to save the travel money and spend it on a better wedding present for Caroline. There were many delays while they made up their minds, though Annette kindly put back the wedding date to suit their plans.

  ‘Both Caroline and her Mother urge my going in October,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘On this account, that, after a young woman is once engaged to be married, it is desirable that the delay afterwards should be as short as possible, as she is subject to perpetual scrutiny and unpleasant remarks, and one of the reasons they urge for marriage in general is that a single woman in France unless she have a fortune, is not treated with any consideration.’

  World events overtook their domestic arrangements, as world events often do. Napoleon escaped from his exile on Elba in early 1815 and by March was advancing on Paris, becoming master of France once again. ‘For the sake of our Friends I am truly distressed,’ wrote Dorothy to Mrs Clarkson, referring, as she often did, to Annette’s family as ‘our Friends’, presumably to keep their identity as secret as possible. ‘The lady whom I mentioned to you from the first was a zealous Royalist, has often risked her life in defence of adherents to the cause and she despised and detested Buonapart. Poor Creature! The letter was concluded at midnight. My Friend says: “I hear troops entering the City. Good God! What is to become of us.” ’

  As we know, world events came to the rescue. Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, though, as ten-year-old Dora said, when they were discussing Napoleon’s escape from Elba, as no doubt it was discussed in every British home, ‘Why did they not kill him when they had him?’

  In February 1816, after endless delays and when it had become clear that William was not going to come, his daughter Caroline got married. She was described on the marriage certificate as the daughter of ‘William Wordsworth, demeurant à Grasner Kendan duche de Westmorland, Angleterre’. None of the Wordsworths was present at the ceremony. Annette, despite her slim resources, did her best to make a big show of the wedding, turning it almost into a royalist celebration: she laid on a grand dinner party and invited all her notable royalist friends.

  ‘The mother’s details of the wedding festivities would have amused you,’ wrote Dorothy to Mrs Clarkson. ‘She perhaps for half a year to come will feel the effects at every dinner she cooks! Thirty persons were present to dinner, ball and supper. The deputies of the department and many other respectable people were there. The bride was dressed in white sarsnet with a white veil, was the admiration of all who beheld her, but her modesty was her best ornament. She kept her veil on the whole of the day. How truly French this is!’

  Over a hundred years later, this rather light-hearted account by Dorothy of Annette’s big day upset the distinguished French scholar Emile Legouis. He was the gentleman who did most to reveal the Annette connection in his book published in 1922 (William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon). As a Frenchman, he obviously felt rather protective towards Annette: ‘The mother had done her utmost, thrown away the last of her gold to attain, as it were, this exaltation of their daughter. What matter if she did it according to her ideas, which were those of a humble French bourgeoise and in the manner of her country. The absent father, the kind aunt herself who had not been able to come, would have done better to check their sense of humour.’

  Professor Legouis also suggested that William, with his ‘£400 a year stamp sinecure’, could have helped them more financially. But, as we know, not only did William have to deduct from this figure a sum for payment of staff and expenses, he also had his own large household to provide for. No details exist of any dowry or wedding presents, but from this date, William did start sending an annual payment t
o his daughter of £30, which was generous enough, considering his circumstances. It was sent from London, through Daniel Stuart, of the Courier. This looks like a device to keep the arrangement private, or a way of preventing William from being directly bothered by the Baudouins. William faithfully sent the money every year, and in 1835 settled a lump sum of £400 on Caroline, bringing the financial arrangements to a close.

  Caroline had a daughter just ten months after the wedding, in December 1816; the child was called Louise Marie Caroline Dorothée—the last name out of affection for Dorothy, who had always addressed Caroline in loving terms. There were two other daughters, but one died aged six. Some time later, Annette did finally get a small government pension from the returned royalists.

  In 1820, William at last visited France again. On the way back from a European tour, he, Mary, Dorothy and Crabb Robinson took lodgings in the Rue Chalot, the street where Annette and the Baudouins were living. The first meeting between Mary Wordsworth and Annette, her husband’s former lover, took place in the Louvre and the encounter was as civilized as the surroundings. No outbursts of emotion were noted, no tears or recriminations. It was all utterly placid and pleasant. Annette and her family didn’t speak English and William’s French must have been rather rusty by now, since he had not been to France for eighteen years. It was at this time that William apparently gave his French family a pencil portrait of himself and a copy of the two-volume Collected Poems of 1815. One of the volumes is said still to be in the hands of the French branch of the Wordsworth family today.

  Crabb Robinson thought the great meeting was perhaps a trifle too civilized. Caroline called Wordsworth ‘Father’, which he thought rather ‘indelicate’. But then, by 1820, William was a very civilized gentleman. Not all passion was spent, by any means, but a lot of his fervour—whether animal, political or emotional—was gradually subsiding.

  IT IS A BEAUTEOUS EVENING

  The ‘Dear Child’ is Caroline, his daughter by Annette Vallon. He wrote the poem in August 1802, when Caroline was nine, walking along the Calais sands.

  IT is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

  The holy time is quiet as a Nun

  Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

  Is sinking down in its tranquillity;

  The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea;

  Listen! the mighty Being is awake,

  And doth with his eternal motion make

  A sound like thunder—everlastingly.

  Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,

  If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,

  Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

  Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;

  And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,

  God being with thee when we know it not.

  18

  Fame

  1820–1830

  A FRIEND of Keats played a literary trick on William in 1819. He saw advertised a forthcoming poem by Wordsworth, ‘Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse’, and before it was published, and before he had read it, he decided to write his own version. To be parodied before publication might not be very amusing for an author, but it is certainly a sign of some kind of success.

  ‘Peter Bell’ had been written twenty years previously, but for various reasons William had never published it. He had contemplated doing so in 1815, but the bad reviews of The Excursion and The White Doe of Rylstone probably put him off.

  Since then, there had been a perceptible change in attitude in the literary magazines: formerly critical publications, like the Eclectic Review, referred to Wordsworth and Southey in 1816 as the ‘two greatest living poets’ and gave a serious consideration of their respective merits and weaknesses. ‘There are passages in all his poems,’ they wrote of Wordsworth, ‘that are fitted with exquisite skill to find their way to the heart. But … when he aims to teach, he fails to please.’

  There was therefore a reasonable glow of anticipation from the critics when the appearance of ‘Peter Bell’ was imminent, though not amongst the younger wits and witlings.

  ‘Wordsworth is going to publish a poem called “Peter Bell”,’ wrote Keats to his brother. ‘What a perverse fellow it is! Why wilt he talk about Peter Bells?—I was told not to tell—but to you it will not be tellings—Reynolds hearing that said “Peter Bell” was coming out, took it into his head to write a skit upon it call’d Peter Bell. He did it as soon as thought on. It is to be published this morning.’

  The very name ‘Peter Bell’ struck them as highly ridiculous, but typical of Wordsworth, and they advertised their version in The Times, with the motto, ‘I am the real Simon Pure.’ The parody was published by Keats’s own publisher. Coleridge wrote to them, saying it was rather bad form and a breach of trust, but they replied that, as the author hadn’t seen a word of the original poem, they saw nothing wrong. The parody was complete with a Wordsworthian Preface and heavy notes, which even amused Coleridge. It was in the metre of ‘The Idiot Boy’ and contained what were now considered the characteristic Wordsworthian rustic characters.

  Keats reviewed it anonymously for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner and the review was reprinted in the Kendal Chronicle, the local Whig paper which was against Wordsworth and the Tory Yellows. Keats did a clever double bluff, calling the skit false and ‘hurried from the press, obtruded into public notice while for ought we know the real one may be still wandering round the woods and mountains’.

  Shelley wrote a much more serious skit on ‘Peter Bell’. He had the reviews of the joke one and the real one sent out to him in Italy. He called his ‘Peter Bell III’, using it as a vehicle to attack all the high Tories like Wordsworth, whom he blamed for the poverty and deprivation in the new industrial towns; but he was persuaded not to publish it, as it would harm his reputation—just as one imagines Wordsworth had been persuaded not to publish his radical pamphlet some thirty years previously.

  Byron’s satire was much more gentle this time. He pretended he was writing a letter to a friend from Germany:

  You are not aware of the works of William Wordsworth, who has a baronet in London who draws him frontispieces and leads him about to dinners and to the play; and a Lord in the country who gave him a place in the Excise and a cover at his table. You do not know perhaps that this gentleman is the greatest of all poets past, present and to come. His principal publication is entitled ‘Peter Bell’ which he has withheld from the public for one and twenty years—to the irreparable loss of all those who died in the interim and will have no opportunity of reading it before the resurrection.…

  William had the last laugh. The real ‘Peter Bell’ was published in April 1819, with a drawing of Peter Bell done by Sir George Beaumont and a dedication to Southey, the Poet Laureate. The first edition of five hundred copies sold out in two weeks. Bad publicity can sometimes be better than none at all. No poetry by Wordsworth had ever sold so quickly. A reprint was immediately ordered.

  All the same, the reviewers were obviously disappointed. Crabb Robinson and William himself feared they wouldn’t like the poem, but, on the whole, the reviewers were gentle in their criticisms, referring to William as a great poet, with some works of genius behind him, but sad that on this occasion he had failed. The Eclectic Review said he was ‘a poet that, after all, cannot be laughed down’. The British Critic, in a very long review, said that Wordsworth would always have enthusiastic admirers, in every age, and that people would always derive from Wordsworth ‘as high gratification as any poet is capable of bestowing’. At the same time, they said that, in every long poem of Wordsworth which was longer than a mere sonnet, a reader had to expect something not to his taste. Other reviewers, making the same point, put it more brutally. One suggested that all his best pieces should be collected in one volume, ‘while his idiots and waggoners were collected into a bonfire on the top of Skiddaw’.

  Even today, the most passionate devotees of Wordsworth would admit that he has lapses, even in his fin
est poems. You are always tempting fate when you aim for simplicity, and for almost all of the thirty years that Wordsworth had so far been displaying his works before the public, the bad parts had blinded the critics to the good parts. In their reviews, they tended to reproduce, out of context, the more ridiculous lines, which naturally didn’t help sales. People then quoted the more awful parts at dinner parties, without ever having read the whole.

  This time, with the publication of ‘Peter Bell’, there was only one really abusive review. It was in the Monthly Review (the Edinburgh Review doesn’t appear to have noticed the poem), which called it daudling drivel and infantine. ‘If a nurse were to talk to any of her children in this manner, a sensible father and mother would be strongly disposed to dismiss her without a character.’ Apart from that, every critic considered it a major work from a major poet.

  It is hard to explain, or even date precisely, the change in feeling of the critical public. It seems to have started in about 1817-18, years in which Wordsworth did not publish any poetry. It could be said that after all these years before the public, resolutely going his own way, sticking to his poetic last and not being deflected, he had taught readers the taste by which his poetry should be appreciated, as Coleridge always said must happen. Looking back, people realized that there had been a lot that they had enjoyed and benefited from, despite all the easily parodiable material.

  Coleridge himself helped immensely by the publication in 1817 of his masterly literary-philosophical Biographia Literaria. In this he wrote that it was Wordsworth’s prefaces that had caused all the abuse, but that now he stood ‘nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton’.

  Despite twenty-five years of generally abusive reviews, many of them by minor writers, now long forgotten, almost all the best minds of the day did basically rate Wordsworth highly as a poet, whatever they might have thought of some poems or whatever they might have thought of him as a man. Keats, notwithstanding all the jokes, considered him a genius: ‘He is superior to us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed a light on them.’ Shelley acknowledged he was a ‘great’ poet, and even Byron was guilty of what was considered plagiarism of the Wordsworthian style in Childe Harold. Few writers of the day were not influenced by him in some way, whatever they may have asserted about him as a person.