1800 In her journal for 3 October, Dorothy Wordsworth records an encounter, while out walking with her brother William, in the Lake District around Grasmere:
We met an old man almost double. He had on a coat, thrown over his shoulders, above his waistcoat and coat. Under this he carried a bundle, and had an apron on and a night-cap. His face was interesting. He had dark eyes and a long nose … He was of Scotch parents, but had been born in the army. He had had a wife, and ‘a good woman, and it pleased God to bless us with ten children’. All these were dead but one, of whom he had not heard for many years, a sailor. His trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce, and he had not the strength for it. He lived by begging, and was making his way to Carlisle, where he should buy a few goodly books to sell. He said leeches were very scarce, partly owing to this dry season, but many years they had been scarce – he supposed it owing to their being much sought after, that they did not breed fast, and were of slow growth. Leeches were formerly 2s 6d. [per] 100; they are now 30s.
It was a striking enough experience for Dorothy to inscribe it at length in her journal. In William it inspired one of his finest poems, and his noblest reflection on the rigours of the poetic career, ‘Resolution and Independence’. In the poem (in which, rather unkindly, he pictures himself walking around Grasmere by himself ) Wordsworth first experiences ‘joy’ at a gorgeous morning, then a sudden decline into melancholy – thinking, specifically, of poets who have died young or wretched or both (principally Burns and ‘the marvellous boy’, Chatterton).
Suddenly, he encounters an old man. How is it you live, and what do you do? Wordsworth asks:
[He] said, that, gathering leeches, far and wide
He travelled; stirring thus about his feet
The waters of the pools where they abide.
‘Once I could meet with them on every side;
But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.’
The leech-gatherer’s courtesy, courage, and stoicism correct his own self-indulgence, and he concludes that when in the future melancholy strikes: ‘I’ll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!’
The poem has some ecological and medical interest. Leeches were in great demand in the 18th and 19th centuries for ‘bleeding’ or phlebotomy – a treatment for a whole range of conditions. The species, due to over-harvesting, was exhausted in Britain by the 1830s and the bulk of leeches (which travel well) were imported from France and Germany. By the beginning of the 20th century the medicinal leech was virtually extinct across the whole of Europe.