Family friends eventually persuaded William to agree to the engagement, but it was on the understanding that Quillinan would now be looking for a secure job and steady home. Having for years been so enthusiastic in his letters about Quillinan, so solicitous and friendly, William now changed completely. He almost refused to discuss the topic of the marriage; in fact, he virtually refused to admit Quillinan’s existence.
Quillinan, naturally, became impatient, unwilling to postpone the marriage indefinitely, which appeared to be William’s hope. Dora told her father one day that Quillinan had written to her, suggesting that they should take a chance on marriage, not waiting for financial security. ‘I must direct your attention,’ wrote Wordsworth in reply, the heavy-handed father, ‘to the fact that you must have overlooked the state in which Dora has long been, or you could not have called upon her Parents to give their Daughter up to a “rough chance”.’
Quillinan took great exception to William’s letter, and for several months the two men were not on speaking or corresponding terms. Eventually, after pressure from family friends, the marriage was at last arranged—a good two years after Dora had hoped it would take place. William had finally agreed on negative grounds: he would not oppose the marriage, but he was still not for it. He said he loved Dora too much and cared too much for her future happiness to bless such a marriage. ‘But I must submit and do submit, and God Almighty bless you my dear child, and him who is the object of your long and long-tried preference and choice.’
The marriage took place in Bath in 1841, at the home of a family friend who had taken Dora’s side in the long and bitter family row. John, her brother, came down from his west Cumberland vicarage to marry her, and her younger brother Willy gave her away. William and Mary came down for the wedding and William intended to go to the church, but at the last moment he did what Dorothy had done at his own wedding thirty-nine years previously. He couldn’t face it. He talked to Dora alone before the ceremony and then told Quillinan that ‘this interview with my child has already so upset me that I think I can hardly bear it’.
It is difficult not to feel some sympathy for everyone concerned. William’s anguish for his delicate daughter was more than just fatherly emotion. Quillinan could not, on the face of it, give her the sort of stability she needed.
Dora, for her part, was now nearly thirty-seven. So far, she had given absolute devotion to her father, but she wanted to marry the man she loved, a man whom she’d known for twenty years, all her adult life. He was a dear family friend, someone they’d all loved and whose company they’d always all enjoyed. She wasn’t running away with a stranger. She couldn’t understand why her father had turned against him. William put a brave face on it. He invited them to have their honeymoon up at Rydal Mount, while he and Mary continued on a little tour of the West Country.
Over at Greta Hall, the 1830s brought some similarly sad events, plus a few very happy ones. A great bond of friendship had grown up between the members of the next generation at Greta Hall and Rydal, with Dora being the best friend of Sara Coleridge and Edith Southey. When Sara got married in 1829, to her first cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, the bridesmaids included the three Southey girls (the youngest, Isabel, had died in 1826) and Dora, and the ceremony was performed by John Wordsworth.
But as the older children grew up, married and moved away, Greta Hall became a much quieter house, though still a hive of literary industry, with Southey as busy as ever. In 1835, Peel asked him to accept a baronetcy—an honour Wordsworth was never offered—but Southey declined. He didn’t think he had the wealth to support such an honour. ‘I could afford to die,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘but not to be disabled.’ By this, he meant he had good insurance policies, and some property which could be sold, but that he was still completely dependent on turning out books every year to support his family. In place of the baronetcy. Peel increased his small government pension, which he’d had since 1807, to £300 a year.
The first domestic tragedy at Greta Hall occurred in 1834. A visitor chanced to arrive at the house at the moment it happened and later a friend described what he’d witnessed.
On passing the drawing room he noticed several ladies apparently in a cheerful mood. On giving his name, after waiting five minutes, Southey came to him, the very image of distraction, took his hand and led him into his study. For a long time he remained silent—at length he told him he believed he must dismiss him; in time he disclosed to him that within the last five minutes, Mrs Southey had, without previous indication or symptom, gone raving mad, and to that hopeless degree that within an hour, he must take her to an asylum.
Edith Southey had been in a fairly depressed state since the death of her daughter Isabel, but appeared to have recovered, though she had never been a particularly lively lady—prone to fears about money, susceptible to religious mania. Southey did send her for a few months to a Retreat for Lunatics at York, then brought her home; but she never recovered her sanity.
Within a matter of months of each other, Rydal Mount and Greta Hall had been stricken with mental illness, each with what appeared to be incurable cases. But whereas Dorothy Wordsworth at least managed to gain some physical strength—enough to walk round the house on occasions—Edith Southey quickly deteriorated. She died two years later, in 1837.
In 1839, Southey surprised almost everyone by marrying Caroline Bowles, one of those literary ladies with whom he’d corresponded and whom he’d helped. She was twelve years younger than Southey and most of his children were greatly upset by the union. The family was split down the middle, with the Wordsworths taking the side of Kate, Southey’s last unmarried daughter, who for a while took refuge at Rydal Mount. Southey’s brother, and another daughter, approved of the marriage and tried to support the new Mrs Southey. Southey had pleaded with Caroline to marry him, feeling old and lonely and very miserable, but she quickly realized that she had become more of a nurse than a wife. His own mental and physical powers began to fade very quickly.
Within a year, Southey’s mind had gone. When William came to visit him in July 1840, he found him still trying to read. ‘Past taking pleasure in the presence of any of his old friends, he did not recognize me till he was told. Then his eyes flashed for a moment with their former brightness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him, patting with both hands his books affectionately, like a child.’
Southey died in March 1843, aged sixty-eight, and internal family hostilities broke out once again, with Kate Southey’s dislike of her stepmother splitting their relations and friends. The Wordsworths, still taking Kate’s side, were not invited to the funeral by Mrs Southey, but William went all the same, unasked, and later wrote the words for one of the memorials.
So ended the literary life of Greta Hall, for forty-three years one of the power-houses in the history of English literature. Together, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey had managed to move the centre of English poetry up to the Lake District and keep it there for well-nigh fifty years. Southey’s poems and books gave pleasure to thousands, but sadly, out of the forty-five books he published, very few are read today. Perhaps his best-known work, apart from his Life of Nelson, is his children’s story, ‘The Three Bears’. (In his original version it’s an old lady who eats their porridge.) He wrote prose with enormous fluency and great style, and, arguably, had more of either than Wordsworth, but in his poetry he lacked that vital ingredient: content. Whatever the faults in Wordsworth, and there are many, he did offer the world a philosophy, moral substance and deep feeling.
Within ten days of Southey’s death, Wordsworth was asked to be Poet Laureate, but at first he refused. He felt too old to write any commemorative verse. Southey, during his thirty years as Laureate, had not been officially obliged to write commemorative verse, but he usually had done so, all the same, though, when he had failed to think of anything suitable for Queen Victoria’s coronation, he had been greatly upset.
William had not gone unhonoured in the preceding years. In 183
8, he received his first honorary degree, from the new University of Durham, which had pleased him. He even made a joke about it, telling Crabb Robinson in a letter that now he had a DCL, ‘you will not scruple when a difficult point of law occurs to consult me’.
The following year, the University of Oxford gave him a similar honour, and he received a tremendous ovation from all the undergraduates. He was told it had only been exceeded by the welcome for the Duke of Wellington. His own college at Cambridge, St John’s, gave him a lot of pleasure by commissioning his portrait by Pickergsill, to be hung in the college.
In 1842, William had given up his Distributorship of Stamps, having at last, after lengthy and devious negotiations, arranged that his son Willy could take it over. His numerous collections of poems were now selling much better than they’d ever sold before, bringing him in an income, by the late 1830s, of £500 a year; but, even so, the loss of his annual £400 Stamp income was quite a substantial one. Poor Willy had failed to get any job all these years, but now, at least, he had an income and a position for life. However, William’s loss had been made good a few months later when, thanks to Peel, he was made a pensioner on the Civil List, with a sum of £300 a year.
William was therefore rather obliged to Peel, and when Peel wrote personally to him, asking him again to take on the Laureateship, he felt forced to reconsider his decision. ‘I will undertake,’ wrote Peel, ‘that you will have nothing required from you. As the Queen can select for this honourable appointment no one whose claims for respect and honour, on account of eminence as a poet, can be placed in comparison with yours, I trust you will no longer hesitate to accept.’
In April 1843, Wordsworth therefore graciously agreed to be Poet Laureate. As his nephew Christopher observed, his grey hairs had long since deserved to be wreathed with laurels. ‘By his earlier poetical effusions, he had earned the bays before he wore them. He wrote laureate odes before he was the laureate. Those lyrical poems are more valuable because they were not official but the spontaneous effusions of inspiration.’
The muse fell silent after the acceptance of the Laureateship, but, at seventy-three, William was still fit and healthy and physically remarkably active. There were more triumphs, and troubles, to come.
JAMES HOGG
Wordsworth’s ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’ was written in a sudden burst of sad inspiration in 1835, almost thirty years after his supposedly greatest writing years were over. He was mourning the recent deaths of Coleridge, Lamb and others, wondering who would be next.
THE mighty Minstrel breathes no longer,
’Mid mouldering ruins low he lies;
And death upon the braes of Yarrow,
Has closed the Shepherd-poet’s eyes:
Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source:
The rapt One, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.
Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!
Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber
Were earlier raised, remain to hear
A timid voice, that asks in whispers,
‘Who next will drop and disappear?’
20
Mellow Moods
1840–1847
TWO new ladies moved into the Wordsworth circle in the last dozen or so years of his life, the more important of whom was Isabella Fenwick. It was almost as if, with Dorothy an invalid, Sarah Hutchinson dead, and Dora about to be married, he needed another female companion to share his moods and his memories. Mary was part of this new friendship, and all three of them were close friends, but it was William and Miss Fenwick who had a special intimacy.
They first met in the early 1830s, when Wordsworth was sixty-five and Miss Fenwick was about fifty. She came across from Greta Hall for dinner one night, with Southey and his daughter Kate. She was a lady of independent means, with a house in Bath, but had originally come from Northumberland, as her border name might indicate. (‘The Forsters, the Fenwicks, they rode and they ran,’ wrote Sir Walter Scott in ‘Young Lochinvar’.) Miss Fenwick was well read, something of an intellectual (though she had no literary pretensions herself), generous, warm-hearted and of a liberal inclination. She was devoted to William and to his poetry, but was well aware of all his faults, which, as their friendship grew, she became well acquainted with. She made frequent and long visits to Rydal, staying and helping for many weeks at a time to nurse Dorothy, and then eventually took her own cottage at Ambleside.
After she arrived, William went regularly to visit her, sometimes reciting passages from The Prelude to her. ‘Or as his little grandson says,’ so Miss Fenwick related, ‘“Grandpa reading without a book.”’
William’s liking for his new lady friend apparently became the talk of the neighbourhood. ‘Wordsworth goes every day to Miss Fenwick,’ wrote Harriet Martineau, the other of William’s new lady friends, ‘gives her a smacking kiss and sits down before the fire to open his mind. Think what she could tell, if she survives him!’
William himself realized what people might think, although the friendship was doubtless completely innocent. He and Mary moved into Miss Fenwick’s cottage for a while. ‘For the sake of her society and change of air,’ William wrote to Crabb Robinson, ‘and above all, because it may not be prudent for me to walk to see her so often as I could wish.’
He did go off on journeys with her: to Cambridge, where he took her to St John’s and showed her his old room; and to Durham, to take his honorary degree. They went on the new railway from Carlisle to Newcastle and did some sightseeing in Northumberland, near her family home. It was a time of great stress for William, with Dorothy’s illness and then Dora’s infatuation for Quillinan, so Miss Fenwick saw him in many moods. ‘What strange workings are there in his great mind, and how fearfully strong are his feelings and affections! If his intellect had been less powerful they must have destroyed him long ago.… I witness many a sad scene, yet my affection and admiration, even my respect, goes on increasing with my knowledge of him.’ She wrote this in 1839, at the height of William’s row with Quillinan. It was thanks to Miss Fenwick that Dora eventually got William’s permission, albeit grudging permission, to get married. She took Dora’s side during the long arguments and talked William into changing his mind, and it was from her house at Bath that the couple got married.
William admired Miss Fenwick for her resolution, listened to her good common sense, and very often acted on her advice. ‘I feel quite sure I know all his faults, all that they have done, are doing and may do. I think I never love a person thoroughly till I know how far they are liable to take the wrong way. I always want to have as little room for my imagination to work as possible.’
Sara Coleridge, herself a young woman of great intelligence and talent, spoke very highly of Miss Fenwick: ‘I take great delight in her conversation … her mind is such a noble compound of spiritual feeling and moral strength, and the most perfect feminism. She is intellectual, but … never talks for effect, never keeps possession of the floor, as clever women are so apt to do.…’
Perhaps Miss Fenwick’s greatest triumph lay in persuading William to dictate to her his memories of his poems and of the circumstances in which they were written. These notes, known to scholars as the IF notes, were written down by Miss Fenwick in 1843 and have been the basis for countless biographical and literary studies of Wordsworth. She entered William’s life at the stage in which he was beginning to look back on his past, to delight in telling stories of his famous contemporaries (most of them dead by then) and of his own early struggles. ‘He recognize
d his own greatness in the midst of the neglect, contempt and ridicule of his fellow creatures which strikes one as what is most extraordinary in his character.’ He was against anyone writing a full biography of him, believing that his life was in his poetry, but, at Miss Fenwick’s promptings, he agreed that it would be useful for posterity to know the background of his better-known poems.
The other lady who came close to William in his final years was herself a professional writer. Harriet Martineau was an eccentric lady who had published many books and had travelled extensively round the world, from the United States to the Middle East. She wrote and gave lectures on economics, religion, tax laws and history. Just before she settled in the Lakes, she had been very seriously ill, confined to her bed, expecting to die, though, at the same time, she somehow managed to publish yet another book, Life in a Sick Room. Then suddenly she got out of bed, left her room and came back to normal life once more, announcing she had had a miracle cure, thanks to mesmerism. In the Lakes, she took a daily bath in her outdoor swimming-pool and lectured the local people on hygiene, anatomy and mesmerism.
She arrived in the Lake District in 1845, aged forty-three, and bought herself a plot of land near Ambleside. She was one of that new breed of immigrants who had been attracted by the literary life associated with Wordsworth. As a young girl, she had been a devoted admirer of his poetry and had pinned up his portrait in her room. She could quote his verse by the hour. On first meeting him, she was rather disappointed, thinking he was now cut off from reality. She was shocked by what she considered the loose living of the peasantry, which William appeared not to notice: ‘Here is dear old Wordsworth for ever talking of rural innocence and deprecating any intercourse with towns lest the purity of his neighbours should be corrupted.’
William Wordsworth Page 39