William took comfort in his five grandchildren—the children of his son John, and, when visiting them, used the opportunity to revisit his childhood haunts nearby in Cockermouth, an area which held no memories of Dora. William took in his stride a mild escapade involving Jane, the eldest of John’s children. In 1848, aged fifteen, she ran away from her rather dull boarding-school at Brighton and spent the night on the railway station. Mary was terribly upset, but William appeared hardly disturbed. ‘He you know takes things easily,’ Mary told Miss Fenwick.
William was more upset when a niece took up with a religious sect and embarked at Liverpool, bound for America. ‘Do you know anything of a wretched set of religionists in your country, Superstitionists I ought to say, called Mormonites or latter day saints?’ he wrote to his American friend Henry Reed. ‘If you should by chance hear anything about her, pray let us know.’
By the following summer, William appeared to have recovered from the worst of his grief, and Miss Martineau reported that he was ‘very cheerful and amiable’, showing visitors round the grounds once more. The accounts which had appeared in some newspapers about his failing mental powers, she said, were ‘utter nonsense’.
Mary recovered the quickest from the bereavement. She had the main burden of the invalid Dorothy to contend with and struggled on bravely, while William was still giving way to his emotions over Dora. ‘I have no help from my beloved Mourner,’ she wrote to Miss Fenwick. ‘He is bowed to the dust.’ But soon they were both making the best of it together, going on little jaunts in their coach to see friends and relations in the Lake District. ‘I have met with very few faultless people in my journey through life,’ Mrs Basil Montagu remarked, ‘but Mrs Wordsworth seemed to me faultless.’
Since Dorothy had become an invalid, Mary had taken a greater part in William’s creative work. In 1835, when he’d finished some poem and Mary had told him he was cleverer than she’d thought he was, there were tears in his eyes: ‘It is not often I have had such praise; she had always been sparing of it.’ Mary kept urging him to work on ‘The Recluse’ in his final years, and not to concern himself with slight sonnets. Before he and Crabb Robinson had left for Italy in 1837, she told Crabb not to encourage him to pursue vagrant subjects: ‘Jingling rhyme does not become a certain age.’ One of the people who has left a poor account of Mrs Wordsworth was Thomas Carlyle: ‘A small, withered, puckered winking lady who never spoke and was visibly and sometimes ridiculously assiduous to secure her proper place of precedence at table.’ Carlyle only knew her late in life, at London dining-tables, away from her home ground. Mr Carlyle could be fairly nasty in his descriptions of most people.
Keats, many years earlier, told a story which also suggested that, when in London, Mary was very aware of her position. At dinner one evening, Mary Wordsworth prevented Keats from disagreeing with her husband by putting her hand on his arm: ‘Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted.’ As for her ‘winking’ eye, it was De Quincey who first noticed this, saying she had a ‘considerable obliquity of vision’.
Dr Arnold, who got to know Mary at Rydal, agreed that she was no beauty when he met her, but ‘the kindness of her looks, tones and actions was rightly valued by all who knew her’. De Quincey, who did know her at a much earlier stage, also spoke of her kindness: ‘The sweetness of temper which shed so sunny a radiance over Mrs Wordsworth’s manners sustained by the happy life she led, the purity of her conscience, made it impossible for anybody to have quarrelled with her and whatever fits of ill temper Wordsworth might have—for, with all his philosophy he had such fits—met no fuel to support them, except in the more irritable temperament of his sister.’
It was a happy marriage, full of love and understanding, as the newly discovered letters show. Mary was quiet, and, according to De Quincey, Thomas Clarkson used to say that all she ever said was ‘God bless you!’ But there’s little reason to think she was subservient. She let William have the open arguments with Dora and Quillinan, but in the background she was equally strong, if not stronger than William. According to Sara Coleridge, Mary wished all her life that Dora, because of her delicate nature, should avoid two things—marriage and authorship. When both happened, she found it hard ‘to submit to these vulgarities’.
William and Mary shared their little jokes, as any couple would after nearly fifty years of marriage—and after over seventy years of friendship, if vou consider that they first met at school, when they were each three years old. One day, as they were waiting for their little carriage to take them on a drive up Easedale, William was ready and she was not. ‘My dear, the carriage is waiting,’ he said. ‘Well, don’t be cross,’ she answered. ‘Ah, I wish we could; it would make a little ripple in our lives.’ You could take that remark as pure pathos, but it seems more likely to have been gentle Wordsworthian irony.
Similarly, when the young Algernon Swinburne, aged eleven, was presented to William by his parents in 1848 on a visit to Rydal Mount, William told him, as they were leaving, ‘I do not think, Algernon, that you will forget me.’ At this, young Algernon is reported to have wept. Was William being ironic, displaying North Country dead-pan humour, or was this simply the conceit of an old man?
In August 1849, when William was in his eightieth year, an American called Ellis Yarnall came to see him—one of that steady stream of Americans who had begun to treat Rydal as a pilgrimage centre. In America, there were even little celebrations each year on the Laureate’s birthday and stories about him were printed in the American press. Yarnall was a friend of Professor Reed, who had recently published a collection of Wordsworth’s poems in America. (Lyrical Ballads first appeared in the United States in 1802.) On Yarnall’s return, he sent Reed a blow-by-blow account of his day with the Wordsworths: ‘Wordsworth came in, it could be no other—a tall figure, a little bent with age, his hair thin and grey and his face deeply wrinkled. The expression of his countenance was sad, mournful I might say; he seemed one on whom sorrow pressed heavily.’ Being a good American scholar, he then went on to repeat every little detail of the day: the furniture observed, the busts and paintings which Wordsworth showed him, how many times the cuckoo-clock chimed and all about a little walk down the lane, where they met a beggar ‘of the better class’. William put his hand in his pocket at once, muttering that he’d given to four or five already that day, but found his pocket was empty.
The conversation, as a whole, is completely unremarkable, but there’s one interesting exchange which, in passing, the American reports in his letter. Only an American bent on recording everything would even have bothered to note it. William was talking about his experiences of the French Revolution, and of how he’d missed the wildest excesses by being in Orleans: ‘Addressing Mrs W. he said “I wonder how I came to stay there so long and at a period so exciting.” ’
The remark obviously meant nothing at that time to the American, and perhaps it meant nothing anyway. Perhaps William was just rambling on. But the fact that he addressed the remark personally to Mary indicates, to me at least, that he was exchanging private looks with her behind the American’s back, enjoying a little piece of teasing. By now, the Annette episode must have seemed centuries away, at another time and another place; but so also were his long middle years, when he was in his stern, voice-of-God, reactionary period, and when it seemed as if he was trying to forget that such an incident had ever happened. Now—an old man, relaxed, indulging his memories and himself, tolerant of the world and its failings—he could afford to be amused by life. Few people have witnessed such dramas, such tragedies, such changes, as the world thundered its revolutionary way past his front door, sucking him in, at several stages, into its raging torrents.
In his own personal world, he had so much to look back upon, both good and bad. Deaths in the family had rarely been far away, from the early loss of his own parents to the death of his children. He’d outlived almost everyone and everything. He knew the time was very near when he would go to meet Dora.
William made
his last trip outside the Lake District in June 1849, when he and Mary went to visit relations in Great Malvern. Crabb Robinson, who joined them there, noticed for the first time a decline in William’s mental vigour, though he was in good physical health. They came back to Oxenholme on the express train from Birmingham, but at Oxenholme they had a two-hour delay, while waiting for the Windermere train. When it came, it was full of holiday-makers—the sort William had always dreaded—heading for the Lakes which William had made famous, and perhaps hoping for a glimpse of the poet himself. He was by now seventy-nine, and the journey proved very tiring.
The following March, when the better weather came, William was out taking little walks round Grasmere, visiting old friends. One of them asked him how Mrs Wordsworth was. ‘Pretty well, but indeed she must be very unwell indeed for anyone to discover it; she never complains.’ It was William they really worried about. He now looked very weak, walking with stick in hand, lightly clad, as usual. A few days later, he walked across White Moss Common to visit another friend, with Mary this time. The friend was out, and, while Mary walked round the garden, William sat down on the stone seat of the porch to watch the setting sun. Two days later, he was taken ill with pleurisy.
He was still in bed on his eightieth birthday, on 7 April, while, in nearby Rydal Chapel, they prayed for his life in the morning and afternoon services. Two weeks later, the doctors told Mary that he was dying. She went into his room and told him very gently, ‘William, you are going to Dora.’ He made no reply, and she felt perhaps that he had not heard her. Next day, when her niece came into his room and was drawing the curtain, William awoke and said, ‘Is that Dora?’
William died on Tuesday, 23 April 1850, Shakespeare’s and England’s day, at twelve o’clock exactly, while Miss Fenwick’s cuckoo clock was striking the hour.
TO THE CUCKOO
Dorothy in her Journals describes William working on this poem in 1802, around the same time as he was writing ‘To a Butterfly’. Both poems go back to childhood and his earliest memories, simple, child-like poems written during his greatest creative years.
O BLITHE New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
While I am lying on the grass
Thy two fold shout I hear;
From hill to hill it seems to pass
At once far off, and near.
Though babbling only to the Vale,
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.
Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;
The same when in my schoolboy days
I listened to; that Cry
Which made me look a thousand ways
In bush, and tree, and sky.
To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.
And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
O blessed Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for Thee!
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Postscript
DOROTHY, who had been an invalid for the last twenty years of William’s life, outlived him by five years, dying in 1855, aged eighty-three. Mary lived longest, dying of old age at eighty-eight, in 1859. It says much for their policy of plain living and high thinking that all three lived to be octogenarians.
Mary’s first task, on William’s death, had been to take out from its resting place the ‘poem of his own life’, as it had always been called, and send it to Moxon, the publisher. The dedication was still to S.T. Coleridge, as it had been when William had begun it, some fifty years previously. It was Mary who named it The Prelude.
Almost immediately after William’s death, there were approaches from Baudouin, the husband of William’s French daughter Caroline, who maintained he and his wife should have a share of William’s estate, despite the fact that in 1835, when William had finally settled £400 on Caroline, Baudouin had signed a document agreeing that William’s financial obligation was at an end. Annette had died in 1841, aged seventy-five; from what is known of her character, it is unlikely that she would have allowed such grasping behaviour, had she still been alive. Caroline herself was now fifty-eight, and her two daughters were grown up and married. Baudouin, however, threatened to come to England, ‘to look after his interests if necessary’, so Crabb Robinson recorded in his memoirs. He and Quillinan conferred on the best way to deal with him, fearing that money would be the price of his silence, as there were hints that he would publish certain revelations. They took legal advice and sent a long letter in French but nothing more, apparently, was ever heard of the matter.
Caroline herself died in 1862. She was survived by her two daughters, the elder of whom (the one who included Dorothée among her names) married twice, bearing two daughters, who in turn produced seven children. Today there are several direct descendants of Wordsworth, living in France. On the legitimate side, there are many direct descendants of the poet living in England today, including five great-great-grandchildren.
Mary’s next problem, after the publication of The Prelude, was a biography of William. She knew that he had been against any formal work of this kind, believing that his best biography was his collected poems and that an additional brief memoir would be sufficient for posterity. It had been thought by many friends and relations that Edward Quillinan might write the official biography, and he himself hoped that he would; but in 1847, the year of Dora’s death, William and Mary had quietly drawn up an agreement with William’s nephew Christopher by which he was to be given permission to write a biography and was to be offered all the help he would need. This happened at a time when Quillinan and William were temporarily estranged. Quillinan knew nothing of the agreement until a week after William’s death. Nonetheless, he gave Christopher all the help he could, making available the invaluable notes which Miss Fenwick had made and had given to Dora.
When the two-volume biography was published in 1851—it appeared in the same year in the United States, edited by Henry Reed—many friends thought it dwelt too much on the conservative and religious side of William’s life, glossing over his revolutionary and anti-clerical youth. It was also thought a shame that someone who hardly knew him should have been entrusted with the task. Today, the book is still not considered by some scholars to be very valuable, but it does contain many first-hand explanations of the background to his works mainly based on Miss Fenwick’s notes, which are still primary sources. It probably helped to reinforce the general Victorian view of Wordsworth as a stern, god-fearing, humourless figure. It contains almost nothing about Mary. There is indeed a chapter entitled ‘Marriage’, but it is one of the shortest chapters in the book, only five pages long, and consists almost entirely of quotations from William’s poems. Did Mary refuse to provide any details about herself? She was known to be against such a publication, as being contrary to William’s wishes, but had allowed it to go ahead, not wanting further family disagreements.
Strangely enough, Dr Christopher Wordsworth, then a Canon of Westminster and later Bishop of Lincoln, wanted to include something of the Annette relationship. He maintained that it was a commonplace rumour and that someone had even mentioned it to him in the street. He did, apparently, include some information about it in his first draft, but Crabb Robinson and Mary, who wished to ‘prohibit it absolutely’, Crabb Robinson said, persuaded Christopher to omit everything. The only reference, in the published version, was to Wordsworth being ‘encompassed with strong temptations’ while in France, wh
ich Crabb Robinson still worried might give a hint of some sort of immorality. But, as we know, nothing about Annette became public till the 1920s.
The publication of The Prelude in 1850 did not turn out to be as important an occasion as Wordsworth might have hoped. The 1830s had been William’s greatest decade for sales, critical acceptance and general popularity, but, in the 1840s, Tennyson was quietly coming to the forefront. The publication in 1850 of In Memoriam coincided with Wordsworth’s death, and was Tennyson’s most successful publication so far—and it helped to secure him the Laureateship. For the next three decades, Wordsworth suffered something of a decline, as Tennyson became the great Victorian poet. It wasn’t until 1897, when the French scholar, Emile Legouis, produced his study of The Prelude, that the importance of the poem was fully realized, though by then, many of Wordsworth’s poems were back in critical favour again, thanks mainly to the works of Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s careful selection in 1879 of the best of Wordsworth in the ‘Golden Treasury’ series was a best-seller. At a time of falling creeds and religious doubts, Arnold pointed the way back to Wordsworth—though, at the same time, he was very aware of his faults.
Wordsworth’s faults have always been well recognized, from the Edinburgh Review onwards. It was Coleridge who observed that a work of art should never be judged by its defects, which is a good basic rule for all critics; but, in a way, Wordsworth’s defects are part of his fascination. They have caused him to be more parodied than any other English poet. In his lifetime, Byron, Shelley and Keats all had sport at Wordsworth’s expense, and this continued throughout the nineteenth century, with wits and witlings sharpening their baby teeth on him, from Thackeray (whose first published work was a Wordsworth skit) to Lewis Carroll (’I saw an aged, aged man,/A-sitting on a gate’).
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