William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  By the 1840s, the poet who once wrote verse which ‘would never do’ was being asked by all and sundry for locks of his hair. In 1844, he gave some to Basil Montagu, one of his few old friends who had survived: ‘I send you the lock of hair which you desired, white as snow, and taken from a residence which is thinning rapidly.’ One of his faithful servants, James Dixon, who acted as gardener, groom and manservant, was also responsible for cutting William’s hair. ‘But the locks were never thrown away from that venerable head,’ wrote Edwin Paxton Hood, ‘but found their way into hundreds of hands in every part of the Empire. He kept also a quantity of cards with the poet’s autograph and with this he sometimes comforted those who failed to see him, by either a lock of his hair or a dash of his pen.’ The famous today are not nearly so considerate, though doubtless Dixon managed to be suitably recompensed for his troubles by William’s admirers.

  During the 1840s, the crowds came so frequently to Rydal that during the summer season there were often long queues at the gate. Harriet Martineau estimated that he received about five hundred strangers a year into his garden, and, if they were lucky or had brought an introduction, they got a tour of the house as well and a peep at Dorothy.

  Wordsworth lectured them on nature and on what it was like to be Wordsworth, hardly listening to their own views and opinions. One day, Miss Martineau sent round two eminent educationalists, knowing William loved discussing education, but he didn’t hear their introductions and addressed them as part of his ever-changing audience. Later, on learning that two eminent educationalists were in the district, he sent for them, unaware that he’d already met them.

  On another occasion, a visitor who had travelled in the East managed to break into Wordsworth’s usual flow about Lakeland, and had the daring to say that he personally preferred the solitude of the Arabian deserts. ‘My blood was up,’ Wordsworth related to a nephew of Coleridge’s who was visiting him. ‘I said “I’m sorry you don’t like this, perhaps I can show you what will please you more.” I strode away and led him from crag to crag, hill to vale, for about six hours, till I thought I should have to bring him home, he was so tired.’

  William received many lords and ladies, bishops and knights, but his only royal visitor to Rydal was Queen Adelaide in 1840, the Dowager Queen, widow of William IV. William described how she was much taken by the beauty of the scenery and told him how she would like a little cottage in the Lakes. ‘I led the Queen to the principal points in our little domain … she took her leave, cordially shaking Mrs Wordsworth by the hand as a friend of her own rank might have done. She had also inquired for Dora who was introduced to her.’

  It wasn’t until 1845, by which time he was Poet Laureate, that he met Queen Victoria herself. He made a special trip to London for the Queen’s Fancy Dress Ball, where he was presented to the Queen. He was wearing the full court dress, with sword and cocked hat, borrowed from his old friend, the writer Samuel Rogers. (It was the same outfit which Tennyson later borrowed to wear when meeting the Queen, after he in turn had become Poet Laureate.) William told his American friend, Henry Reed, that the wife of the American ambassador witnessed his meeting with the Queen and he described how she was moved to tears. ‘To see a grey haired man of seventy five years of age kneeling down in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a young woman is a sight for which institutions essentially democratic do not prepare a spectator of either sex.… How must these words shock your republican ears!’

  When in London, on his regular trips, he still rushed through the social round, often having three breakfasts in one morning, just to cram in all the people who wanted to meet him. ‘He complains of being worn out,’ wrote Mary in 1843, ‘yet we cannot get him to spare himself. He complains of a pain in his chest, but I doubt the cause is his talking often against London noises, and in London society.’ He met Mr Gladstone and dined with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Tennyson was introduced to him and signed Dora’s album, writing for it his poem, then unpublished, ‘The Eagle’. William afterwards spoke most generously of Tennyson, who was just making his name, calling him ‘the first of our living poets’. In earlier years, he’d usually been highly critical about almost all the younger poets. Now he felt the grand old man, the sage of Lakeland, come down to pass on his wisdom and dispense his kindness.

  One of William’s oldest London friends was Benjamin Haydon, for a time the most successful portrait-painter of the day, who had introduced him to Keats at his ‘immortal dinner party’, as Haydon called it, in 1817. Haydon had included William in his massive painting, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, along with Voltaire and Newton. He painted William again in 1842, showing him against a background of Helvellyn; the picture is now in the National Portrait Gallery. In 1840, aged seventy, William had climbed Helvellyn, but Haydon hadn’t been there at the time. As in the Jerusalem painting, Haydon was using artistic licence. These paintings were well known and well exhibited in their day, and reproductions appeared in many books. The Helvellyn portrait even inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write a sonnet about it, ‘Wordsworth upon Helvellyn’, which she sent to William in a copy of her poems. Haydon also made a life mask of William’s face in plaster. He had taken all William’s measurements, which amused William, who proudly copied them out to show Mary. He was 5 feet 9 7/8 inches high, he said, and of very fine proportions.

  Haydon eventually fell from fashion and his paintings ceased to be popular, though William remained faithful to his old friend. Haydon was something of a megalomaniac and couldn’t accept rejection. The most humiliating incident occurred in 1846, when an exhibition of his paintings was mounted in the same building in which Tom Thumb, the midget, was being displayed. Haydon went to see how his exhibition was faring and was very pleased by the hurrying crowds. It turned out that they were all going to see Tom Thumb. Only two spectators were in the room where his paintings were hung. Not long afterwards, he shot himself. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning remarked, ‘His love of reputation was a disease. The dwarf slew the giant.’

  The giant Wordsworth, however, strode on, though a little less energetically. He was planning a further European trip in 1849, at the age of seventy-nine, but it never took place. His trip to Italy with Crabb Robinson in 1837 proved to be his last journey to the Continent.

  William’s last Lakeland tour of any duration was in 1844, when he went with Mary, his son-in-law Edward Quillinan and some others up the Duddon valley, retracing one of the happiest and most frequent expeditions of his boyhood and manhood alike. The trip was a slightly melancholy one. Early one morning, Miss Fletcher, one of his companions, found him wandering slowly down the road on his own, while the party slept, and she went with him into a churchyard. He told her he had not slept well. The recollection of former days and people had crowded in upon him, especially the memory of his dear sister. ‘When I thought of her state, and of those who had passed away, Coleridge and Southey, and many others, while I am left with all my many infirmities, if not sins, in full consciousness, how could I sleep?’

  Travelling was always one of William’s pleasures, and he had long been fortunate that after Dorothy, his old travelling companion, had begun to suffer failing health, Dora had for many years been able to take her place. He was also fortunate that he saw in his lifetime the most dramatic changes in transport that the world had ever seen. In his youth, the world moved at the speed of the fastest horse. By his middle age, steamboats and steam trains were commonplace, and travelling has never been the same again. He had a new pair of eyes beside him when he went back to places like Loch Lomond, and took pleasure in Dora’s fresh observations on the same sights he’d seen with Dorothy some thirty years or so before; but this time he saw them from a steamboat, chugging up the Loch, as opposed to being rowed across on a ferry.

  RAILWAY

  His sonnet ‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’ was composed in 1844, when he was seventy-four. The opening lines are still very popular with preservationists.

  Is th
en no nook of English ground secure

  From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown

  In youth, and ’mid the busy world kept pure

  As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown,

  Must perish;—how can they this blight endure?

  And must he too the ruthless change bemoan

  Who scorns a false utilitarian lure

  ’Mid his paternal fields at random thrown?

  Battle the threat, bright Scene, from Orrest-head

  Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance:

  Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance

  Of nature; and, if human hearts be dead,

  Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong

  And constant voice, protest against the wrong.

  21

  Last Days

  1847–1850

  WILLIAM’S worst prediction about Quillinan appeared to come true almost immediately after his marriage to Dora. He’d always worried about Quillinan’s lack of financial security, but he’d discounted several rumours alleging his involvement in suspicious deals. In 1842, Quillinan was arrested on a charge of fraud in connection with the property of his first wife’s family, and, though he was cleared at the trial of any criminal charges, his weakness of character was publicly revealed. William stood by him completely, aware of his lack of discretion but convinced of his basic honour. Quillinan was left facing large debts, and it was obvious that on an annual income of £70, with which he had to support a wife and two children, he would never clear them. For the next four years he took Dora and his two children on endless wanderings—to London, to lodgings in Ambleside, and to the Cumberland coast. He was supposedly working on a translation of the Portuguese writer Camoens, although everyone knew that, even if finished, it would bring him very little money.

  ‘You say he could not procure employment,’ wrote William to Miss Fenwick, who was still defending Quillinan. ‘I say he does not try’. The Wordsworths stayed with Quillinan and Dora at the seaside once, and William was perturbed by his apparent lack of interest in his wife and children, preferring his books and newspapers. ‘Yet, poor Creature, she is very fond of him.’

  At Rydal Mount, they had rigged up a special shower bath, which Dora could use when she was in lodgings nearby; she came three times a week, and they hoped the showers would improve her health. Quillinan thought they did, though the shower frightened a young gardener’s boy, who’d never seen such a thing before: ‘Blowed if I didn’t watch butler fill it and then goa and pull string, and down came watter and I was ’maazed as owt and I screamed and Mr John come and fun’ me and saaved my life.’

  Dora’s health hardly improved, despite the showers, and she spent much of every day lying on a couch, trying to conserve her feeble strength. The latent tuberculosis, which she had showed signs of from the age of eighteen, was made worse by the slightest mist and rain, and she was always susceptible to colds and coughs. In 1845, Quillinan decided to take her off to Portugal, hoping the sun would finally cure her. Quillinan had been born in Portugal and his brother, who worked in the family wine firm, offered them a villa near Oporto. The Wordsworths weren’t very keen on the plan, fearing perhaps they’d never see Dora again. William is usually portrayed as the one who fussed most over Dora, but Mary was equally concerned. ‘Mrs W’s anxiety is natural,’ wrote Quillinan, ‘and Dora’s unwillingness to pain her, and to leave her at 75 is all right—but it is a pity that Mrs W does not take more cheerfully to the only plan to restore her daughter’s health.’

  After a poor start, for May can be as unreliable in Portugal as in England, Dora’s health did improve dramatically, and she was writing ecstatic letters to her friends, saying how ‘Old Daddy, Mammy and Dearest Miss F would be amazed by her recovery. She climbed mountains, rode Andalusian ponies and ‘slept like a top and ate like a ploughboy’. They were away for a year, and out of the experience came a book which Dora published soon after their return: A Journal of a Few Months Residence in Portugal and Glimpses of the South of Spain. The inscription read, ‘These notes are dedicated in all reverence and love to my Father and Mother for whom they were written.’

  Dora came back glowing, and Sara Coleridge, who met her in Hampstead in June 1846, said she had not seen her look so well since her ‘teenish girlhood’. Even nicer for the Wordsworths, Dora, her husband and her two step-daughters decided to come back to the Lakes for good, taking a house at Loughrigg Holme. William had for a while his three children and grandchildren all settled at the same time near him in the Lakes. John, who had been abroad with his family for the sake of his wife’s health, was now back at his vicarage with his five children. Willy, the proud Distributor of Stamps, at last got married in January 1847, aged thirty-six. He’d been engaged once, four years previously, to a distant cousin; but the engagement was broken off, since the girl turned out to be mentally unstable. The girl he did marry, Fanny Graham, was from the Carlisle area, though her parents had moved to Brighton.

  Dora went to Carlisle at Christmas, to help Willy, to whom she was devoted, furnish a home for his bride. She caught a cold in Carlisle (which, for all its many attractions, is not quite as warm as Portugal) and, despite resting and taking things easy, was quite unable to throw it off. By April 1847, she was in such a weakened state that her husband realized she was dying.

  William and Mary were in London at the time, staying with friends in Hampstead, but they left London on 1 May when they heard the news, never to return. They moved Dora into Rydal Mount, which in reality had always been her home, and together they nursed her for eleven weeks, knowing all the time that she was dying. The end came on 9 July 1847, just a year since she’d returned from the sun, convincing everyone that her health was now better than it had ever been. William was totally shattered.

  There had been much mourning in the Wordsworth family all those years ago, when brother John had died at sea. There had been deep distress only the previous year, when William’s only surviving brother Christopher, now retired as Master of Trinity, had died. But the death of Dora was a truly emotional shock from which William never recovered.

  Two other distressful deaths occurred almost immediately after Dora’s. The first was of Isabella, the wife of John, who had gone off once more to Italy for the sake of her health, but had died while abroad. The second was of Hartley Coleridge—not a blood relation, but someone who had, from birth, been part of the Wordsworth family circle.

  Hartley Coleridge had always been a strange figure. As a child, he had amazed everyone with his brilliance, but, even when Hartley was only six, Wordsworth had worried about his future, as he showed in his prophetic lines, written in 1802: ‘To HC, Six Years Old’.

  O blessed vision! happy child!

  Thou are so exquisitely wild,

  I think of thee with many fears

  For what may be thy lot in future years.

  The childhood visions which Hartley clearly experienced, and others saw radiating in him, were in a way reflected in William’s great ‘Immortality’ ode. Hartley did seem to arrive trailing clouds of glory; but then everything went wrong. He succeeded in winning his fellowship at Oxford, but lost it after a year, through intemperance. He tried schoolmastering and journalism with little success; then returned to the Lakes, where he lived in a series of rented rooms, drinking too much and borrowing from the Wordsworths. William always stood by him and loved him like a son, despite his vagrancy and dissolute life. Everyone, indeed, loved Li’le Hartley, as he was called. Those peasants whom Canon Rawnsley interviewed preferred reminiscing about Little Hartley to reminiscing about Wordsworth, remembering him for his endless cheerfulness and willingness to talk amusingly all day long to anyone who cared to listen. In 1849, he died in an upstairs rented room at Nab Cottage, Rydal Water, just a few hundred yards down the road from Rydal Mount.

  William went to Grasmere Church with Derwent Coleridge, Hartley’s brother, to choose a site for Hartley’s grave; they picked a
spot beside the grave of Sarah Hutchinson and near to Dora’s. ‘Let him lie by us,’ said William. ‘He would have wished it.’ Then William instructed the sexton to measure out the ground for his own and for Mary’s grave. As William looked up once more from Dora’s grave, he told Derwent that he could see Hartley standing there, on the spot where he’d stood at Dora’s funeral. Finally, turning to the sexton, he said, ‘Keep the ground for us—we are old people, and it cannot be long.’

  Though William was distraught by Dora’s death, and for months was inconsolable, so that friends feared for his mental state, his final days were not unhappy. At first, he refused to go and visit Quillinan, who himself needed comforting, and this in turn led to Quillinan being indignant and upset. But this sad family rift was at length healed, thanks mainly to the good offices of Crabb Robinson. He came to stay with the Wordsworths every Christmas at Rydal in the latter years; it delighted him, as a bachelor, to join in their family festivities, playing games and giving out presents. The Crabb, as he was known in the family, was a great talker: Miss Fenwick’s joke was that when he wasn’t talking he was asleep.

  He was a funny-looking old man, who mocked his own unattractiveness, not being at all upset when Wordsworth’s grandchildren asked about his strange face and where he’d got it from. He wasn’t as ugly as little Hartley, who’d made a profession of his own ugliness, boasting that he was going to start an Ugly Club, with himself as first chairman. The Crabb loved playing whist, which was their usual winter evening occupation, though, during that first Christmas after Dora’s death, William at first refused to play, as he was reminded of all the hands of whist he’d played with Dora. He would start weeping uncontrollably at the mention of her name and go from room to room, avoiding Crabb; but by the time Crabb had left to go back to London, William had much improved.