HAWKSHEAD is a little town in south Lakeland, between the lakes of Windermere and Coniston. It was the home town of Ann Tyson, a lady not known today to the world at large but still remembered in Hawkshead for her connection with young William Wordsworth. She was married in 1749, aged thirty-six, to a local carpenter called Hugh Tyson. They had no children and, when his business declined, she opened a little shop which sold foodstuffs and clothing materials. They did a good line in luxury goods, such as tea at up to eight shillings a pound, though the most popular brand was something called Bohea, a dark tea which sold at 4s 4d a pound. Tea and coffee were relatively new in England at the time, but very popular with those who could afford them. Those who couldn’t drank ale. Mrs Tyson also sold sugar, brown or white, and a crystallized sugar which she referred to as Candy, which was popular with local schoolboys. This is mentioned in her accounts in 1762, seven years before the first known example of the word ‘candy’ appeared in print, according to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.
The good townspeople of Hawkshead could certainly afford their little luxuries. It was a thriving town, back in the eighteenth century, a centre for the woollen trade, an ancient activity in southern Lakeland which had gone on for centuries and had been famous in Shakespeare’s day. (He refers in Henry IV to a well known cloth called Kendal green.) There were no roads as we know them in the area, not till towards the end of the century, and no carriages until 1792, but the rough tracks were alive with pack-horses, carrying on their backs the raw wool, the finished materials, or the products of other local industries, such as charcoal-burning. The charcoal was used for iron-ore smelting in little bloomeries which dotted the surrounding forest areas, right down to the Furness coast. Pedlars, very often Scotsmen, moved from town to town, hawking their wares. Sad soldiers, also often Scotsmen, trudged along the pack routes, limping with their wounds, back to their homeland. England was at war almost ceaselessly for about forty years, starting in the 1770s, with America struggling for its independence, and continuing with the long war with France which followed the Revolution.
By 1779, the Tysons, now well into their sixties, had given up the shop and had decided instead to take in boarders, boy pupils from the local grammar school. Amongst their first batch were two young Cockermouth boys, Richard and William Wordsworth.
Mrs William Cookson from Penrith, the boys’ grandmother, paid the Tysons ten guineas for their board and lodgings for the half year, plus 10s 6d extra for Ann Tyson to do their washing. It is not known who rode down with them from Penrith to settle them in. Perhaps the family groom, James, brought them. Their father, John Wordsworth, was apparently too busy with his Lowther affairs to take them down personally, though he did pay their grandmother for having settled their bills.
William was nine and Richard eleven. They spent their entire Hawkshead schooldays with Dame Tyson, as did the two younger Wordsworth boys, who soon followed. She became a mother figure to them, a substitute parent for four displaced boys, the most constant adult figure in Wordsworth’s growing-up years, a loved figure whom he always cherished. She hadn’t been educated, nor had she read any books, though her ledgers show that she was at least literate. She had once worked in Scotland as a servant and was full of her experiences. Some people thought she tended to go on somewhat, when she started on her old tales, but William loved to hear them. The most surprising thing about her was the enormous freedom she allowed William. Even at the age of nine, when he had just arrived to lodge with her, he was out roaming the fields and the fells almost half the night. It was in general a very good school, which was no doubt why John Wordsworth had chosen it for his sons. Mrs Tyson, an old lady unused to children, was informal and permissive. She was a church-goer, but she didn’t try to indoctrinate young William. She allowed him to be himself.
If you stand in the middle of Hawkshead today, carefully avoiding the hordes of tourists, it is easy to see what a prosperous business town it once was. The wool merchants have gone, but their houses remain, handsome buildings, grouped in small squares, or overhanging little cobbled lanes. Hawkshead is the prettiest town in the whole of the Lake District today, and by far the best preserved.
But it is hard to imagine the former prosperity of the modest little building which was Hawkshead Grammar School. The town’s ancient school building is still there, neatly painted and preserved, with the original desks still in rows, the books on the shelves, but, alas, the pupils all gone. It is such a little building, yet it held a hundred boys when Wordsworth attended it, which is difficult to believe. Even more surprising, Hawkshead Grammar School was one of the north of England’s most successful and distinguished schools, sending several boys to Cambridge every year, many of whom went on to become prize-winning Fellows. It had been founded in 1585 by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, who’d been born locally. All lessons were free, although boys who came from outside the immediate neighbourhood (including the Wordsworth boys) had to pay cockpennies, an entrance fee of about a guinea a year. (It was called cockpenny because originally the headmaster collected the pennies and awarded a prize for the boy with the best fighting cock. Cock-fighting, which was particularly strong in Cumberland, Westmorland and north Lancashire, was not made illegal until 1849.) The school allowed up to twelve charity boys to get their lodgings free, as well as their education. It was in many ways typical of English grammar schools of the day. Even at the great public schools, boys lodged with dames. Boarding houses, run by masters, didn’t take over until the nineteenth century, which was when public schools generally became the way they are today.
In the eighteenth century, the poor boys at Hawkshead, as at most schools, sat side by side on the crowded benches with the sons of the local gentry and professional people. The real nobs, of course, usually had their children educated at home by tutors. The successful, popular schools—and a school could lose its pupils and masters in just a decade, if it fell out of favour—were enormously crowded. There was only one large classroom at Hawkshead, plus two smaller ones above, and so the classes must have been large. (The big popular southern schools of the day, such as Sherborne and Shrewsbury, had at times seventy-five in a class and Eton once had two hundred in a class.)
The basis of the education was Latin—hence the name grammar school. It was the world of Rome and grammar of Latin which had been the sign of the educated man and the entrance to all professions since medieval days. Most of all, Latin got you into the Church. Schoolmasters were clerics and a common route to becoming a bishop was to be a headmaster first.
Hawkshead drew boys from all over the Lakeland area, from Carlisle, which had its own perfectly good grammar school, even more ancient than Hawkshead’s, down to Furness and north Lancashire. During Wordsworth’s days, judging by a list of names of those who donated library books before going up to university, the range was even wider, with boys coming from Edinburgh, Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester. The Edinburgh boys, two brothers, appear to have been the only sons of an aristocratic family (one of them later became ninth Earl of Stair). The ten or so charity boys were usually sons of local craftsmen (Mrs Tyson boasted that her husband Hugh had been a charity boy, though this is in doubt), but the majority had fathers who were clerics, lawyers or army officers, with the occasional woollen mill owner or even landscape painter.
School, it seems, started at six o’clock in the morning in the summer, and at seven in the winter, which meant that old Mrs Tyson had to get them up in summer time at about five fifteen for breakfast, which more often than not was porridge. Just after eleven, they broke for lunch, which was boiled mutton, if they were lucky; then back for afternoon school from one till five. William used to get up even earlier than he needed in order to walk round the shores of Esthwaite Water, Hawkshead’s local lake, before school.
He’d been at the school only two weeks, so he recounts in The Prelude, when one evening, in the twilight, hardly able to see the shore in the gloom, he came across a pile of clothes, left by someone who had apparently gone bathing. Next day, in the light, he came back and watched some men in boats, with grappling irons and long poles, fish out a drowned body. A rather nasty experience for a young boy, but the fact that he was only nine, and being allowed out at all hours of night and day, is also significant.
It was what he loved, of course, wandering the countryside or taking part in all the rural activities. Hawkshead, unlike either Cockermouth or Penrith, is right in the heart of Lakeland, surrounded by fells and lakes. William skated every winter on Esthwaite Water, a shallow lake which freezes quickly, though in those days every winter seemed to be freezing. Today, our winters seem positively Mediterranean by comparison. Even Windermere, Lakeland’s biggest lake, just four miles from Hawkshead, was often hard enough for skating. William joined in the hunt, and went searching for raven’s eggs, all of which makes very lyrical reading in The Prelude, though the incentive was probably monetary gain as much as anything else. Rewards were given for killing vermin, such as foxes (which could net five shillings a time) or ravens, though well-brought-up grammar school boys were not supposed to do this, under school rules. William loved fishing, and there’s a nice account of him persuading a fisherman to take him angling in the Duddon valley, which was a good ten miles away. They were away a whole day, crawling back late at night, with little William, exhausted, being given a piggy-back by the fisherman. The furthest he went, along with some schoolfellows, was down to Furness Abbey, some twenty miles away, but this time they hired horses. He also loved boating, racing his schoolfellows on Windermere or, on one occasion, stealing a boat on Ullswater for an evening row across the lake, till he came face to face with a huge, dark mountain, towering over him, and retreated, terrified, just as he had terrified himself imagining all sorts of horrors on Penrith Beacon.
For well over a century, scholars and interested amateurs have had great fun trying to identify the people, such as pedlars, fellow schoolboys or discharged soldiers, described by Wordsworth in The Prelude, and many of them have been traced—even ones whom the poet admitted later had been amalgamations of several characters.
William was very fond of sitting on the benches round the centre of Hawkshead, especially at the church, and of talking to the old men of the town, listening to their tales of the old days. Research has shown that a surprising number of old men lived in Hawkshead in those days. In 1785, for example, while Wordsworth was a schoolboy at the grammar school, nine of the twenty registered burials were of people aged from eighty to eighty-nine. In those days, of course, if you survived birth and early childhood—and in many towns up to half the newborn population died—then you had a good chance of living to a reasonable age.
The struggle to identify Wordsworth’s cottage in Hawkshead, the one where he lived with old Mrs Tyson, has been one of the most popular searches for easily a hundred years. Tradition for a long time pointed to a little cottage right in the middle of the town, and it is named as Wordsworth’s cottage on the local picture postcards. Ernest de Selincourt, the great pre-war Wordsworthian scholar, believed this was where William had lived with Mrs Tyson, but a discovery by Mrs Heelis, a local sheep farmer who lived nearby at Sawrey, showed that Ann Tyson had in fact lived at Colthouse, about half a mile away. Mrs Heelis found Mrs Tyson’s old ledgers, now an invaluable source for all Wordsworth scholars, and traced her home to Colthouse. (Mrs Heelis is better known to the public as Beatrix Potter.) Mary Moorman, in the first volume of her classic study on Wordsworth, published in 1957, based on this discovery, and on clues in The Prelude, her belief that Wordsworth had spent all his school-days with Mrs Tyson in Colthouse. Today, a compromise appears to have been reached amongst the experts, though naturally new evidence, or new fashions, might change all this. It is now thought that Wordsworth lived with Mrs Tyson in the middle of Hawkshead for his first few years, but that he moved with her to Colthouse by 1784, when her husband died. So, both places are correct. The post-cards needn’t be scrapped.
William’s life with Mrs Tyson was fairly frugal. Though other boys who lodged with her occasionally had cakes or bottles of wine on their bill, William lived the simple life, most of it in ‘pennyless poverty’. Candles and coals were extras which they could rarely afford, though he usually had a few shillings to spare for such luxuries at the beginning of each term on his return from the school holidays. The summer holidays were probably spent in Penrith, while Christmas was spent with his father in Cockermouth.
The Cockermouth connection ceased, and a more frugal life began, with the death of William’s father in 1783. He had been about his Lowther business in the southern part of the Lakes, in the Millom area, where he was Coroner, when he lost his way in bad weather while riding home from Broughton-in-Furness to Cockermouth. He was forced to spend the night without shelter on the slopes of Cold Fell. He suffered a severe chill from which he never recovered. William said later that his father had never kept his usual cheerfulness of mind since the death of his wife. The official cause of death was given as dropsy.
William’s father died on 30 December 1783, aged forty-two, during the boys’ Christmas holidays. William remembered afterwards how he’d waited impatiently at Hawkshead for the ponies to arrive. Transport was always a source of trouble at Hawkshead, with everyone dependent on horses to take them home. This time, the horses sent by his father did not turn up, though William had been sitting on the road for a long time, moaning about their absence—only to arrive home and find his father mortally ill, much to his anguish and mortification.
John Wordsworth’s death merited only one line of appreciation in the weekly Cumberland Pacquet: ‘Jan 6, 1784. Last Tuesday, about half past 12 o’clock, Mr Wordsworth, Attorney, of Cockermouth, departed this life after a short confinement. He lived deservedly esteemed and died universally lamented.’ Dorothy said later that it was ‘mortifying to my Brothers and me to find that amongst all those who visited at my father’s house he had not one real friend’.
Worst of all, he left no real money. His estate, in theory, was handsome enough, even though he died before his prime earning years: it totalled £10,485, an impressive amount for those days. But, on investigation, it turned out that almost all of it was made up of debts people owed him—chiefly his employer, Sir James Lowther. He did leave a bit of property, but the rents were exceedingly modest. His immediate effects and belongings were sold for £328 and the cash in hand proved to be £225. What was missing was the large sum of £4,625, owed by Lowther. It turned out that he had never been paid for his Lowther work, a mysterious state of affairs which has never been satisfactorily explained. There was virtually nothing to split between the five children, though the family began legal proceedings against the Earl of Lonsdale, as Sir James Lowther became later that year. This legal action, which proved very costly in itself, became a huge, dark cloud, a veritable albatross, which hung over the Wordsworth children from then on, blighting their lives in many ways.
They were now truly orphans, though they had felt as if they were ever since the death of their mother, with the added embarrassment of poverty and complete dependence on their relations for survival. The children found themselves under the guardianship of two uncles: Uncle Richard Wordsworth and, worse still, Uncle Kit, the Penrith uncle William had never liked. They’d always looked upon William as a bit of a burden anyway, because of his personality. Now they would have to pay for his education too. Poor William. He and the two elder boys attended the funeral. Christopher, the youngest, was still at Penrith, being too young for Hawkshead Grammar School. Dorothy missed attending the funeral as well, being away in Yorkshire with relations.
She had felt hardest done by of all, being separated from her brothers, but was finding that her life with her Halifax relations wasn’t as bad as she’d feared it would be. They were kind and considerate, unlike the Penrith relations, and she made many good local friends, though all the time she was wondering what was happening to her brothers. During her father’s lifetime, they’d usually managed to be at home in Cockermouth for those Christmas holidays, but Dorothy never made it, which was very sad, especially as her birthday was on Christmas Day:
I can almost tell where every Birth day of my life was spent, from a very early time. The Day was always kept by my Brothers with rejoicing in my father’s house but for six years, the interval between My Mother’s death and his, I was never once at home, which I cannot think of without regret for many causes and particularly that I have been thereby put out of the way of many recollections in common with my Brothers of that period of life which, whatever it maybe actually as it goes along, generally appears more delightful than any other when it is over.…
Back in Hawkshead, William was indeed having a delightful time and could forget the unpleasantness of the Penrith household. His night-and-day wanderings continued throughout his school-days, though he doesn’t appear to have neglected his school work. He never won any prizes, but at this period of his life he was a keen reader, when he wasn’t out roaming the lakes and fells. ‘Had I been born in a class which would have deprived me of what is called a liberal education, it is not unlikely that, being strong in body, I should have taken to a way of life such as that in which my “Pedlar” passed the greater part of his days.’
He had quite an active social life as well, as he got into his late ’teens. He spent many a wet evening with the other boys in his lodgings, playing cards round the peat fire, and he became very fond of dancing. The school didn’t arrange this, but a Mr Mingay had for a time a dancing academy in Hawkshead which all four Wordsworth boys attended. Mr Mingay, a gentleman of several talents, also taught fencing and French. In The Prelude there are several references to late-night dances, parties with strawberries and cream and other jollifications. But were there any girls? William did go out walking during at least one school holiday in Penrith with Mary Hutchinson, one of the Hutchinson sisters who’d been at the Penrith dame school with him, but he doesn’t appear to have had any lady friends in Hawkshead. The local county girls certainly looked to Hawkshead School to produce suitable beaux for their dances, but William seems not to have become attached to any girl in particular. The scholastic sleuths have been through every possible Hawkshead record over the last hundred years, but still no girls have yet been turned up.
William’s first poetry was written in 1784, when he was aged fourteen, as a school exercise, on a subject beloved by schoolmasters to this day—what I did in my summer holidays. The lines don’t survive, which is probably just as well, but some verses which he wrote the following year do survive; again, these were written as a school exercise to celebrate the school’s bicentenary.
After that, William started to write verses on his own account. The first poetry which he composed spontaneously, he later recalled, was written after walking home late from a dance. Most of his visions, his dream-like trances, occurred on his walks, even on the half-mile or so walk from his lodgings in Colthouse to school, though he usually extended this to a five-mile walk by going round the lake. ‘I was often unable,’ he said years later, ‘to think of external things as having external existence and I communed with all I saw as something not apart from but inherent in my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality.’
The great reunion with Dorothy was due to take place in the summer holidays of 1787, after William had finished his final term at Hawkshead School. She’d recently been sent back to Penrith from Halifax, to live with her grandparents and help out in the shop. Dorothy wasn’t at all pleased at this, as she’d enjoyed her years at Halifax, apart from the separation from her brothers, and had friends whom she was to keep all her life. It is lucky for us, however, that she did go back to Penrith, for, from now on, the best running commentary on the activities of William Wordsworth is the one supplied by Dorothy: an incessant letter-writer who, almost every day of her life, sent off two or three huge letters to her friends, keeping them in touch with what she was doing.
As the summer holidays approached, Dorothy was in a fearful state, waiting and longing to see her long-lost brothers; it would be her first meeting with them for nine years.
I was for a whole week kept in expectation of my brothers who staid at school all that time after the vacation begun owing to ill nature of my uncle (Kit) who would not send horses for them because when they wrote they did not happen to mention them, and only said when they should break up which was always before sufficient. This was the beginning of my mortifications for … indeed nobody but myself expressed one wish to see them. At last however they were sent for, but not till my Brother William had hired a horse for himself because he thought some one must be ill.
The brothers at last turned up and Dorothy had many happy hours together with them, especially with William. They read some newly published poems by Robert Burns, which had just come out in the Kilmarnock edition. A friend had recommended them to Dorothy, and William got the book for her from a local book club in Penrith.
A few weeks later, in a letter to a friend, Dorothy gave an interesting pen portrait of her four brothers and their characters. She was sixteen at the time.
They are just the boys I could wish them, they are so affectionate and so kind to me as makes me love them more every day. Wm and Christopher are very clever boys at least so they appear in the partial eyes of a Sister. No doubt I am partial and see virtues in them that by everybody else will pass unnoticed. John, who is to be the sailor, has a most excellent heart, he is not so bright as either Wm or Christopher but he has very good common sense and is very well calculated for the profession he has chosen. Richard, the oldest, I have seen, he is equally affectionate and good but he is far from being as clever as William, but I have no doubts of his succeeding in his businesses for he is very diligent and far from being dull. Many a time have Wlm, J, C and myself shed tears together, tears of the bitterest sorrow, we all of us, each day feel more sensibly the loss we sustained when we were deprived of our parents and each day we do receive fresh insults.
The insults were long and hurtful and Dorothy always felt mortified (one of her favourite words) by the servants, who obviously took the lead from the uncle and grandparents and continually abused them, especially about their poverty, pointing out that they were living on charity. They had been hoping that Lord Lonsdale would at least pay some of his debts on account, but they’d just learned that he refused to pay anything at all. Dorothy’s letters are full of references to their troubles:
I daresay our fortunes have been weighed thousands of times at the tea table and I have no doubt but they always concluded their conversations with ‘they have nothing to be proud of.…
We are found fault with every hour of the day both by the servants and my Grandfather and Grandmother, the former of whom never speaks to us but when he scolds which is not seldom. We have been told thousands of times that we are liars.…
My Uncle Kit has taken a dislike to my Brother Wm and never takes any notice of any of us.…
William, at the time, was apparently thinking of going into the law, like his father and grandfather before him, and as Richard was going to do. Dorothy, however, did have her little worries about him: ‘He wishes very much to be a Lawyer if his health will permit, but he is troubled with violent head aches and a pain in his side, but I hope they will leave him in a little time.’
Dorothy was naturally very upset when they all left Penrith at the end of the summer holidays. ‘I cannot paint to you my distress at their Departure. I can only tell you that for a few hours I was absolutely miserable, a thousand tormenting fears rushed upon me, the approaching Winter and the ill nature of my Grandfather and Uncle Christopher.’
In the autumn of 1787, William was due to take up residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. He was a liberal and well-educated young man of the times, well ahead for his years in mathematics and Classics, a noisy, sociable fellow with his friends, but given to strange periods of introspection and silences. There is no doubt he had enormously enjoyed the freedom of his days at Hawkshead, a great relief from the constraints of Penrith. The strange visions, the sudden feelings of being at one with nature, could possibly have contained an element of escape, subjugating the deeper fears and insecurities caused by the deaths of his mother and father, the lack of love from his relations and his worries about the future. His guardians still found him moody and ill-tempered, hard to like, hard to control and with a definite streak of rebellion in him. They made it plain that they considered they were doing him a great favour by continuing to pay for his education. And they made it even plainer that he had better curb his wayward ways and work hard at Cambridge.
These lines are taken from The Prelude, begun early in 1799 and finished in 1805, and are about one of his greatest pleasures from his Hawkshead school days, a sport he continued throughout his life.
All shod with steel,
We hiss’d along the polish’d ice, in games
Confederate, imitative of the chace
And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,
The Pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideways, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the image of a star
That gleam’d upon the ice: and oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks, on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion; then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopp’d short, yet still the solitary Cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll’d
With visible motion her diurnal round;
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch’d
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.