Everyone was surprised when she and William became friendly. The rest of the Wordsworth household considered her rather potty and strange, and didn’t care for her Dissenting views, her politics or her general free-thinking attitude to life. She gave Quillinan a hundred cabbage plants for his cow, as part of her campaign for agricultural reform in the Lakes.
At their first meeting, William told her that she’d taken the wisest step in her life by buying her plot of land. She expected him to go on and say that it was the perfect retreat for an elderly woman recovering from an illness, but he explained that he was thinking in financial terms: ‘The value of your property will be doubled in ten years.’ She was confused by William’s own little economies, which she saw as a strange mixture of meanness and generosity. When she drank tea with him, there was not a drop of cream available, yet she’d seen him earlier giving away milk with a lavish hand to the surrounding cottagers. ‘They were perfectly well able to buy it, and would have been all the better for being allowed to do so.’
William ignored most of her political opinions, and was totally sceptical about her mesmerism and vegetarianism, but found her a warm and vital character. He went on many an outing with her, charmed by her liveliness and her capacity for enormously long walks. ‘She is the briskest and most active person in the vale,’ said Mary Wordsworth. ‘Miss Martineau’s intellectual activity shames all idlers,’ said Quillinan. Long after William’s time, she went on to become an institution in the Ambleside district.
The local farm workers found her just as amusing as the gentry who dined with her.
I met her the other day walking along the muddy road [recalled a peasant woman]. Is it a woman, or a man, or what sort of animal is it. There she came, stride, stride, great heavy shoes, stout leather leggins on and a knapsack on her back! Ha, ha, that’s a political comicalist, they say. But I said to my husband, goodness, that would have been a wife for you. She’d ha’ ploughed, and they say she mows her own grass and digs her own cabbages and potatoes. Well we have some queer uns here. Wordsworth should write a poem on her. What was Peter Bell to a comicalist?
One of the gentry who met Miss Martineau was the Rev. Sydney Smith, a founder of the Edinburgh Review and later a Canon of St Paul’s. Perhaps the wittiest cleric of the century, he is remembered today for his definition of heaven as ‘eating pâtés de foie gras to the sound of trumpets’. He was an acquaintance of Miss Martineau, but not exactly an admirer. His definition of hell is not quite as well known today as his remark about heaven. Hell, so he realized in a dream one night, was being in a madhouse, shut up with Harriet Martineau.…
William himself was looked upon as something of an eccentric by the local people, with his shepherd’s style of clothing—his rough plaid trousers, loose brown frock-coat and black handkerchief round his neck. He had allowed his hair to grow longer at the back, which gave him a very distinctive appearance, and he often wore a straw hat, with a veil to shade the sun. When his eyes were really bad, he wore green shades, though, in his last decade, his eyes don’t seem to have bothered him as much as they did in earlier years. Thomas Carlyle met him several times in London, at breakfast parties, and described a device Wordsworth had taken to using: ‘He carried in his pocket something like a skeleton brass candlestick in which, setting it on the dinner table, between the most afflictive or nearest of the chief lights, he touched a little spring and there flirted out, at the top of his brass implement, a small green circle which prettily enough threw his eyes into shade and screened him from that sorrow.’
Wordsworth’s teeth, which he’d been so proud of keeping, eventually started to go and he had to have some false teeth fitted. ‘This little box contains my artificial teeth which want repairs,’ he wrote to his publisher, Edward Moxon (who’d worked at Longmans and then set up his own firm, which William joined). ‘Be so good as to take them if you can find time or let them be sent if you cannot to the Dentist.’ London publishers do have their uses. At Rydal, William usually took his teeth out in the evening, when he and Mary were alone together, which annoyed Harriet Martineau. After she got to know him, and began calling in to see him on her evening walk, he refused to put them in, and she couldn’t understand half the things he was saying; so she changed her habits and made her social calls during the day. He usually talked at great length about his poetry, she recalled, complaining that it was the reviewers who had prevented him from earning more than £100 a year for a very long period.
Wordsworth never had any sense of smell, so this was one faculty which wasn’t affected by age. It appears to have been a congenital deficiency, which must have been rather a handicap, for a poet of nature, and if you read his words carefully, you’ll notice an absence of reference to smells. When he writes about flowers, for example, he tends to glorify scentless flowers, like daisies and lesser celandines, rather than roses. It has often been said that the lack of real passion of the sensual or sexual variety in Wordsworth’s poetry is the outcome of his northern-ness, which sets him apart from such hot-blooded southerners as Keats, Byron and Shelley. But perhaps the explanation lies in his lack of a sense of smell. You miss a lot of lush sensations when your olfactory organs are not working.
According to Southey, there was only one occasion in William’s life in which his dormant sense of smell was suddenly awakened. It happened back in 1797 at Racedown, when Mary Hutchinson came to visit him and they walked past a bed of stocks in full bloom. ‘The fact is remarkable in itself,’ Southey recalled in a letter, ‘and would be worthy of notice, even if it did not relate to a man of whom posterity will desire to know all that can be remembered.’ But this story is completely denied by William’s nephew Christopher, who, in his Memoirs of his uncle, dismisses it as purely imaginary: ‘Miss H. expressed her pleasure at their fragrance, a pleasure which he caught from her lips, and then fancied to be his own.’ William himself never appears to have remarked on this handicap, either in his letters or in his poetry.
Wordsworth was also unmusical; though, when abroad, he might go to the opera, as part of a sight-seeing trip. This again fits in with his rather chaste, frugal, unsensual outward image, which shows in his poetry—if not always, as we now know, in his life. He did get very worried once that he thought his hearing was going. He was in Italy in 1837 with Crabb Robinson (the long-planned trip, one which Dorothy now could no longer manage) when they heard a cuckoo—or rather, Crabb Robinson heard it, and William didn’t. ‘I recollect perfectly well that I heard the cuckoo at Laverna twice before he heard it,’ wrote Crabb Robinson, ‘and that it absolutely fretted him that my ear was first favoured; and that he exclaimed with delight, “I hear it! I hear it!” ’ The cuckoo, which William often wrote about, is, as birds go, unmusical.
Apart from his eyes, William remained in perfect health well into his seventies, going on long walks and, even at seventy-five, so he said in one letter, helping with the hay in his field (Dora’s field) from half past eight in the morning till one o’clock.
On his seventy-fourth birthday (on 7 April 1844), a huge party was given in the garden of Rydal Mount, to which all the children of the neighbourhood were invited—some three hundred of them—plus one hundred and fifty adults of all ages, both sexes and all classes. ‘We had music of our preparing,’ wrote William to an American friend, Professor Reed, ‘and two sets of casual itinerants, Italians and Germans, came in successively and enlivened the festivities.’ Each child got an orange, a piece of gingerbread and a hard-boiled pace egg. William did his bit by romping with the children and playing games. One of his neighbours remembered the scene years later, as if it had all been a dream: ‘It is perhaps the only part of the island where such a reunion of all classes could have taken place without any connection of landlord and tenant, or any clerical relation or school direction.’ The party was the inspiration of Miss Fenwick, who paid for it and organized it—another example of her understanding of William, her knowledge of what would delight him. Another of her inspired birthday gi
fts, presented when he was seventy, was a German-made cuckoo-clock (she was aware of his great love of cuckoos), which hung at the top of the stairs at Rydal Mount and delighted the family, especially Dorothy. Dorothy watched it from her wheel-chair and rocked with laughter, so Mary said, at the ‘sudden exit of the little Mimic’. William wrote a poem about the cuckoo-clock, saying how its voice soothed him during sleepless nights. (It now hangs on the stairs at Dove Cottage.) ‘It has been a work of real pleasure,’ wrote Mary to Miss Fenwick, ‘for no children were ever more delighted with a toy.’
William’s delight in children was well known and never diminished; on his walks, at home or away, he was always stopping and talking to them—often asking them to repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and then going through the words with them and giving them pennies. ‘In winter time,’ wrote Harriet Martineau when he was in his late seventies, ‘he was to be seen in his cloak, his Scotch bonnet and green goggles attended by a score of cottagers’ children—the youngest pulling at his cloak or holding by his trousers while he cut ash switches out of the hedge for them.’ But was William still in touch with the ordinary country folk, as opposed to their children? Miss Martineau hinted that he had grown away from them, and a strange little book, produced after his death by Canon Rawnsley, of Keswick, entitled Reminiscences of Wordsworth among the Peasantry of Westmorland, indicates that in later life he hadn’t much contact with the peasants. ‘He’d pass you, same as if yan was nobbut astean,’ recalled a butcher who’d delivered meat to the Wordsworths four times a week as a lad. ‘He wozn’t a man as said a deal to common fwoak,’ said one old waller, ‘but he talked a deal to hiseen. I often seead his lips a ganin.’
According to their memories, it was the two women of the household who had appeared to the local people to be the clever ones. They found Mrs Wordsworth plain and stiff, but very good at accountancy, while Dorothy, until she became ill, impressed the most of all. ‘Miss Dorothy, she was ter’ble clever woman. She did as much of his poetry as he did and went completely off it at the latter end, wi’ studying it, I suppose.’
None of them ever read his poetry, or knew anything about it; but, there again, the local Cumbrian gentry didn’t exactly rush to buy it either. In 1833, William was complaining to Moxon that there ‘was no genuine relish for poetical publications in Cumberland, not a copy of my poems having been sold by one of the leading booksellers, though Cumberland is my native county’. But of course the quality knew all about him and invited him to their tables, and he invited them back. ‘There’s nea doot but what he was fond of a quality, and quality was fond of him, but he niver exed fowk aboot their wark, nor noticed t’flocks or nowt; not but what he was a kind man if fwoaks was sick or taen badly.’
Random memories, even taken down by someone as assiduous as Canon Rawnsley, aren’t completely reliable, but there are enough of them, plus the diaries of local ladies like Miss Martineau, to suggest that Wordsworth had rather lost contact with the rustic characters on whom his poetic reputation had been founded. It wasn’t surprising of course. His Tory views, his landed friends, his honorary degrees and government recognition had obviously distanced him from them.
One of his last campaigns was to stop the railway coming into the Lake District. He feared all the common people from Lancashire would come into his vale and ruin it. Being uneducated, they therefore couldn’t appreciate mountains and lakes and would therefore spoil the scenery for those of taste and discrimination, such as himself. It was an extremely elitist view, and one which brought William many enemies as he argued his cause in letters to the newspapers and in appeals to Gladstone—all to stop the proposed Kendal and Windermere railway getting as far as Grasmere and Rydal. Even Crabb Robinson thought he was harming his reputation. In his poetry, he’d exalted the poor and glorified the beauties of nature, and he’d made a lot of money from his Guide to the Lakes, but now that they were going to descend on him, he was horrified. He wasn’t against railways as such: he had written a poem about them and used them with pleasure. He just didn’t want ten thousand Lancashire folk coming on day trips, or, even worse, the new merchant class building even more holiday homes. In the end, when the railway opened in 1847, it stopped at Windermere, thanks to his and other people’s protests, and never reached Ambleside.
Apart from his outburst against the local railway, William had mellowed considerably by the 1840s. All the family tragedies of the 1830s, and the general state of the country, had conspired to make him an alarmist and a reactionary, forever prophesying doom and the end of civilization, as he knew it. But, by his seventies, he had in a sense outgrown the fears and worries of his middle age. As he looked around at the world in general, he realized that the 1832 Reform Bill had not brought about all the disasters he had predicted. His heart was nearly always in the right place—though his younger radical critics would never have put it so generously—but during his long middle age he had backed the conservative factions in almost every public debate, as the only way, he thought, of bringing about the freedom and happiness of all classes.
By living so long, he outlived his own and the country’s latent reactionariness. By the 1840s, his letters are suddenly full of sentiments and attitudes which it would have been impossible to find in his letters of the 1830s. In that letter about his seventy-fourth birthday party, for example, he holds out hope for the future, albeit with a backward look:
One would wish to see the rich mingle with the poor as much as may be upon the footing of fraternal equality. The old feudal dependencies and relations are almost gone from England, and nothing has yet come adequately to supply their place. There are tendencies of the right kind here and there, but they are rather accidental than aught that is established in general manners. We are, however, improving, and I trust that the example set by some mill owners will not fail to influence others.
In 1845, he had a long discussion on education with his neighbour Miss Fletcher, during which he told her that he felt indulgent towards young men who could not decide on a profession. He himself had been in the same position, he said, and had incurred the strictures of his friends and relations. He had been unable to decide between the Church, the law and the army. ‘He always felt he had talents for command, but he felt if he were ordered to the West Indies, his talents would not save him from the yellow fever.’ A few years earlier, he had been telling friends that sons should be made to learn a profession, and should be pushed into habits of discipline and perseverance, which was how he tried to bring his own sons up (though he had singularly failed in the case of Willy). But now, in his seventies, William was expanding on the theme that young men should be allowed to enter the profession ‘of their own choice’.
When one of the Chartists, Thomas Cooper, called on him at Rydal in 1846, he said that the Chartists were right in their campaign to extend the franchise, and they would surely achieve their aim in the end. He had only ever been against their methods, especially the use of physical force. Back in 1832, however, at the time of the first Reform Bill, his recurrent fear in all his letters had been rather different, terrified that the lower classes would one day attain power. In old age, he fulfilled his own prediction, made in London in 1794 when he was a poor wanderer, but one he had forgotten for many years: ‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall ever continue.’
William was walking on a private estate one day with Coleridge’s nephew, when the lord who owned the ground came up and told them they were trespassing. Much to his companion’s embarrassment, William argued that the public had always walked this way and that it was wrong of the lord to close it off. ‘Wordsworth made his point with somewhat more warmth than I either liked or could well account for. He had evidently a pleasure in vindicating these rights, and seemed to think it a duty.’
On the subject of moral freedom, he also became less doctrinaire as he grew older. One day in 1844, in the market-place in Ambleside, he met a friend who was seeing off on the mail-coach a young man wh
o was going up to Balliol. ‘He entered at once on a full flow of discourse … on the subject of college habits and of his utter distrust of all attempts to nurse virtue by an avoidance of temptation. He expressed also his entire want of confidence (from experience he said) of highly wrought religious expression in youth.’
He realized, as an old man, that the characters of youth and age were very similar. He explained to a friend how the inherent variety and originality of youth merged into dull uniformity in middle age, but then reappeared afresh in old age. He likened the process to the growth of trees. In the summer, they all appeared the same. It was only in the spring and autumn that you saw their real characteristics. This certainly applied to Wordsworth’s life, though his middle years did seem to go on for an unconscionably long time, as he trotted out his uniformly conservative reactions on almost every issue. Which was the real Wordsworth—the radical youth, the solid reactionary middle-aged citizen or the liberal and mellow old man? What a fortunate life, anyway, to have three selves to look back on.
By the 1840s, not only William’s contemporaries, like Coleridge and Scott, had gone, but so many writers of the next generation, who had been coming up so hard on his heels, had died young—one of the tragic coincidences of English literature. Keats died in 1821, aged only twenty-six; Shelley in 1822, aged thirty; and Byron in 1824, aged thirty-six. In a matter of only three years, the three brightest flames of their generation had perished. For over twenty years, Wordsworth had been virtually on his own, the first and also the last of the Romantic poets.
If Wordsworth had died young, he might have been spared much of that abuse which dogged him in his late thirties and forties. An early death would have lent enchantment to his image. The young poets could not have accused him of selling out in his middle age, if he’d never reached middle age, as they sadly didn’t. Now, he had outlived all his critics. He had come back into favour and seen the tide completely turn; the public had now been educated to his tastes.
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