WORDSWORTH set off by coach for Cambridge in October 1787, accompanied by his uncle, the Rev. William Cookson, and his cousin, John Myers, who was also going up to St John’s College. His Uncle William was his mother’s younger brother, a young man of thirty-three who’d done very well for himself, considering he was a draper’s son. He’d had a brilliant career at Cambridge, was now a Fellow of St John’s and had for a time been a tutor to three of the royal children. He was obviously destined for a nice living somewhere, one of the plum country rectories which his college controlled, a step which would no doubt in the end lead to even higher things. He’d been in Penrith most of the summer holidays, which had been a welcome surprise for Dorothy and William. He’d taken a great interest in Dorothy, helping her to learn French and arithmetic, a pleasant change from shirt-mending and serving in the shop. He’d even been kind to William (unlike his elder brother, the horrid Uncle Kit) and was keen to help him at Cambridge and with his future career, outlining the various stages ahead for a bright but impecunious young gentleman like William. Do well at the books, my boy, get a good degree and then a fellowship. That will give you an income till you get ordained, and then you’ll be secure for life. William at least must have considered this advice, during those long hours as the coach rolled south, for he very soon gave up all thoughts of a legal career.
William had with him in his trunk some new clothes, which Dorothy had made for him. Ann Tyson, before he had left her in Hawkshead, had also got a few things ready for him. She’d charged him 4s 1 1/2d for velvet, which she’d had made into a jacket for him, and some silk at 4s 9d for a waistcoat and stock. He might have been a simple country boy, but he didn’t want to look a complete bumpkin when he arrived in Cambridge.
They’d gone about two hundred miles on their coach trip when William had a rather nasty experience—quite shocking really, for a country boy who’d led a secluded life. In the town of Grantham, or it may have been Stamford, neighbouring busy little coaching towns on the Great North Road, both of which must have appeared equally wicked to William, he heard for the first time in his life the distinct sounds of women swearing and blaspheming. Even worse, he saw ‘abandoned women’, given over to ‘open shame’ and ‘public vice’. Goodness knows what the Rev. William said. Perhaps he was more used to such sights than his seventeen-year-old nephew. England at the time supported a ‘great army of prostitutes’, according to G.M. Trevelyan, and the harlot’s cry was heard in almost every town. William, as he observed rather sadly in The Prelude, saw worse later: ‘Afterwards a milder sadness on such spectacles attended.’
It was all excitement in those first few weeks at Cambridge, a mad whirl of new sensations, as William, the archetypal fresher, did the introductory rounds, accepting invitations, suppers and teas, conversations and counsel. He looked up all the old Hawkshead boys he knew; nine of them were there, which shows how well his little grammar school was doing in those days. Some of them were now terribly important, swaggering fellows, but they were all very friendly to the new boy from their old school. He paid a call on his tutor, hastened to a tailor, arranged to have his hair powdered (as the style then was for young Cambridge gentlemen), ordered silk stockings and turned himself into a dandy over-night, though one hardly old enough to shave, hardly able to disguise his lack of manhood. He roamed the famous colleges, proud of the spectacle, proud of himself, admiring the views, admiring himself. St John’s is not, architecturally, one of Cambridge’s finest colleges, and his room turned out to be little more than a cell above the kitchens, but, by pulling his bed to the little window, he could see an avenue of splendid elm-trees, and, by craning hard, he could see Trinity College and the statue of Newton, then the dominant influence in Cambridge teaching.
Wordsworth couldn’t have had a better or happier start at Cambridge. It was true he arrived as a sizar, a sort of charity boy, one who paid reduced fees, but he later received a small scholarship. At one time, sizars had been forced to serve at table to pay their fees, but this had ceased by the time Wordsworth arrived. All the same, if only his father had lived, then he might not have needed to take the social status of a sizar. His uncles, who begrudged his small fees anyway, were sending him to Cambridge on the cheap.
His good start was due to his schooling and to his connections. William Taylor, the young and brilliant headmaster at Hawkshead, whom William said was the person who had first encouraged him to write poetry, had only recently come down from Cambridge, where he’d been Second Wrangler in 1778 (second in the BA honours list), and therefore knew the Cambridge system. It was he who’d pushed the Hawkshead boys ahead in mathematics, knowing that was Cambridge’s obsession. Taylor had died, aged only thirty-two, in William’s second last year at school. William, with some other senior boys, had been called into his room, where he lay on his death-bed, and they’d each kissed him on the cheek. Years later, when William visited Taylor’s grave at Cartmel, he’d cried real tears, imagining he could hear his voice. One of the many things William owed to Taylor was that, when he arrived at Cambridge, he found himself a year ahead of everyone else in Euclid.
As for good connections, having your uncle as a Fellow is naturally an asset, but there was also Edward Christian, another Fellow of St John’s, who, for one year, early in Wordsworth’s school days, had been headmaster at Hawkshead. He was also from Cockermouth, the brother of Fletcher Christian. At Cambridge, he was lecturing in law, and was soon to become Professor of Law. A year or so later, while still quite young and relatively unknown, he was chosen by the Wordsworth family to carry on their lawsuit against the might of the Lowthers Northerners generally were in powerful positions in Cambridge at the time, and were prejudiced in favour of boys from their old schools or counties.
At the end of his first term, William was placed in the first class in his college examinations, despite dashing round Cambridge and enjoying himself, soaking up all the dazzle and novelty—a Dreamer who thought that Cambridge was a Dream. But by the end of his first year, in June 1788, he suddenly dropped to the second class. He had become completely disillusioned with Cambridge and had given up all attempts to follow a proper course of study, dropping his honours course and ignoring lectures, to the absolute bewilderment of his Uncle William and all his other well-wishers. Wilfully, he was throwing away every advantage. What had gone wrong? Had those fancy clothes and fancy life gone to his head?
For the rest of his life, Wordsworth looked back on Cambridge with a mixture of anger and melancholy—when, that is, he looked back on it at all. In truth, he wrote and talked little about it, save to dismiss the Cambridge of his time as being wild and dissolute. His attack on it in The Prelude is, in parts, extremely savage. He tinkered around with this bit of The Prelude in later years, toning down his criticisms, blaming himself a bit more; but it is still very violent, describing the dons, for example, as ‘grotesque in character’.
Cambridge, in those days, was indeed in a pretty sad state. There were two extremes of Cambridge life, each of which Wordsworth inspected in turn, observing at first hand their different degradations (though he didn’t really join in, so he says), and then he rejected both of them, one after the other.
One of these extremes, the academic race, was followed by only a small proportion of the students. At the top, it was crumbling and corrupt, with absentee professors and non-lecturing Fellows, who mainly sat around, waiting for some ‘perk’ to come their way. Cambridge was still basically a training-ground for Anglican clerics, but most livings were in the hands of the politicians or of members of the landed aristocracy, such as the Lowthers, who had not only parliamentary boroughs, but clerical livings, in their gift. It was the Prime Minister who personally appointed bishops; so, when Pitt visited Cambridge, the Fellows positively crawled before him. Fellows would even curry favour with their pupils, if they were rich enough. One example was William Wilberforce, a particularly wealthy young student from Yorkshire, who was about to inherit greatness and therefore didn’t need to earn it. He’d recently been at St John’s, where he was a fellow-student of William’s Uncle William, and he was still his close friend (which shows how well the Rev. William had done). While there, the Fellows had actively encouraged Wilberforce to be idle, considering him to be a talented young man of fortune who did not need to work to earn his bread.
The professors and masters of colleges were quick to follow any political wind, favouring the Whigs or the Tories, depending on who was in power. Dr Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, an important Cambridge figure of the day, managed to be reformer and reactionary in turn. At one and the same time, he held down his see in South Wales, the professorship of Divinity at Cambridge and a rich living in Leicestershire, while spending most of his time at his house on Windermere. He had previously been Professor of Chemistry, before procuring himself a DD and moving into Divinity, adroitly securing for himself the best clerical endowment of its kind.
However, to get started on this road to riches and preferment, it was vital for a bright but less affluent or less well connected boy to do well in his examinations. The main examination at Cambridge, upon which everything depended, was the Mathematical Tripos. This may seem rather a strange speciality, and it infuriated many great Cambridge men before and after Wordsworth. Thomas Gray, the poet, had protested some fifty years earlier about the ridiculous emphasis on mathematics; and Thackeray, some fifty years afterwards, felt he would never master algebra and geometry, and left after only one year. The tradition dated back to Newton, Cambridge’s favourite son. There were separate college examinations (as St John’s, which held them every year), and there were other specialist chairs, such as History; but these were almost extras, for graduates or dilettantes. The Mathematical Tripos was what counted, and in the final BA honours examinations everyone who took part was listed in order of merit, from first to last. The top fifteen or so were called Wranglers, from Senior Wrangler down to Fifteenth Wrangler. The secondary honours were similarly graded, and there were many prizes and medals to be won. Cambridge was centuries ahead of the meritocratic society.
It was vital to be high on the honours list and so get a fellowship. There were mental breakdowns, just as today, as people felt themselves slipping out of the race, but there was also a bit of fiddling, as wealthy or well-connected students were ‘huddled’ through their disputations (examinations on philosophical questions which were part of the Mathematical Tripos). You couldn’t actually fiddle your way on to the Wranglers’ part of the list, but to get a respectable position further down wasn’t difficult, either for the reasonably clever or for the wealthy but indolent. The Tripos included moral philosophy and logic, as well as geometry, algebra and arithmetic. Cambridge considered itself rather advanced—its pre-eminence in science dates from these days—whereas at Oxford, where they were firmly bedded in Classical literature, it was as if Newton had never been born.
William hated the syllabus, and felt it had nothing to do with him. If this was how you became a cleric, then he didn’t want to be one; and who would want to be a cleric anyway, once one had seen how they fought and crawled for sinecures and positions. He hated examinations and competition of all sorts. Such a view is more fashionable today, but in Wordsworth’s day the Church almost deified competition, usually referring to it as Emulation. By emulating your betters, you did better yourself. Wordsworth only ever remembered twice in his life being envious of someone. As a little boy, in a foot race in some sports, he’d tripped up his brother when he saw him getting ahead. The second time was at Cambridge, when for a moment he felt jealous of a fellow-student who was better at Italian than he was. Looking back as an old man, he could remember no other occasions. ‘I can sincerely affirm, that I am not indebted to emulation for my attainments, whatever they may be. I have from my youth cultivated the habit of valuing knowledge for its own sake.’
The other extreme at Cambridge—and the one more widely pursued—was the social life. Even the studious did most of their studying in the vacation, as many do today, and looked upon the term as a time for fun. Wordsworth in The Prelude maintains he ‘observed’, not shared, the dissolute pleasures, but they were there and were well recorded by many of his contemporaries.
Thomas Gray had had a few coarse tricks played on him as a Cambridge student, and he was horrified to see the young bucks place ‘women upon their heads in the streets at noon, break open shops and game in the coffee houses on Sundays’. The Tuns Tavern was ‘the scene of nightly orgies in which professors and Fellows set an example of roistering to the youth of the University’. Another poet, William Cowper, reported in 1785 that the universities contained nothing but ‘gamesters, jockeys, brothellers impure, spendthrifts and booted sportsmen’. Coleridge, referring to the 1790s, said that both the universities and the public schools were the homes of ‘vicious habits, unstained acts of intemperance or the degradations akin to intemperance’. Wordsworth was never as specific, apart from referring to ‘rioting, rotting and dissolute pleasures’. He must have been more appalled by Cambridge life than those students who came from the big, southern public schools, where brutality and other vices were almost as commonplace. Hawkshead, in every sense, had been a haven of innocence.
The ‘bucks’, the wealthy undergraduates and those who tried to ape them, followed a life that was a mixture of effeminacy and violence. It was the fashion of the day for gentlemen to be obsessed by their clothes, and in Cambridge, as elsewhere, the trend-setters would spend the whole morning dressing. Little wonder that Wordsworth, despite his handful of home-made smart clothes, rushed straight out to get his hair done and order some more clothes, self-conscious about his homespun northern dress and manners.
In those years, the only meal taken in college was dinner, which was at 2.30 in the afternoon; the undergraduates ate breakfast and supper in their rooms, or in the rooms of friends. As dinner was the social peak of the day, everyone made a big attempt to dress their best for it. Even Christopher Wordsworth, William’s younger brother, who soon followed him to Cambridge, spent forty minutes getting dressed for dinner, despite being the family swot. Christopher kept a diary of his Cambridge days; like almost everyone else, he went on from dinner in college to wine parties, which lasted all afternoon, in the rooms of his friends He usually managed to sober up enough to start working again at about six o’clock, reading the Classics for three or four hours before bed. As for the bucks, since dinner was immediately followed by afternoon wine parties, that meant no more work was done for the rest of the day. Thackeray, when he was up at Cambridge, admitted that there was literally no time for work, what with dressing all morning and drinking all afternoon and evening. As the day wore on, their smart clothes must have begun to suffer—which was no doubt why they had to spend so much time the next day getting ready again. The violence of those days was terrifying. The bucks, rioted in the colleges, breaking down people’s doors, roughing up sizars or anyone they felt like picking on, then going into the streets, breaking down shops and cracking the heads of anyone who got in their way. During Wordsworth’s first year a local drayman of the town was murdered by a gang of rioting students. As Coleridge and others remarked, once you’d seen the vice current amongst the privileged undergraduates, the streets of London could never shock you.
Wordsworth admitted that in his first year he ‘sauntered, play’d, rioted’ along the streets and on one occasion, after a particularly heavy afternoon wine party, got drunk. How shocking. He was actually toasting Milton’s name at the time, so it was excusable, and he did manage to pull himself together and was able to race back to his college before the bell went at nine and the doors closed. But his brain had definitely reeled and it was ‘never so clouded by the fumes of wine before that hour or since’. Wordsworth was in fact virtually teetotal throughout his adult years, as is well recorded, but notice that he says ‘never so clouded’. If he’d literally never touched a drop again, he would simply have said ‘never clouded’, so perhaps he did have a few jars on other occasions in his Cambridge days.
Throughout that first year, he felt himself very much the innocent abroad, the simple country lad. After a year’s excitement and novelty, he was rather glad, when the holidays came, to get back to his former innocent life. When he returned to Hawkshead for his first summer vacation in 1788, he doubtless needed a good rest as much as anything else, after his contact with the wild goings-on at Cambridge.
What a welcome he got from old Mrs Tyson, his motherly dame, who insisted straight away that he should parade round the village, and walk round the fields and along the paths, to let everyone see what a fine young gentleman her little orphan lodger had turned into. He was a bit embarrassed, knowing what some of the locals would think of his gay attire, but he quite enjoyed going the rounds, shouting curt greetings to the farmers, half-way across a field, knowing they’d be amazed when they’d straightened up and taken it all in, but also knowing they wouldn’t say much, not being given to such social ceremonies. He was particularly pleased to see again the old ferryman on Windermere, one who had taken him across the lake so many times over the years, going back and forth to school. Naturally, he went to see his school friends, regaling them with his adventures and his dazzling Cambridge life.
Above all, it was easing himself into his old physical surroundings that pleased him most—to be in the only place he knew of as home, rushing upstairs to stretch himself out on his old bed, joining the other student lodgers at Mrs Tyson’s big communal dining-table, feeling the garden and the trees, walking round Esthwaite Water, luxuriating in nature, returning to his real self again. Or was it his real self? He was a trifle confused, worried by the new pleasures he’d seen and enjoyed. He realized his imagination had slept, while he’d sauntered and idled round Cambridge. He half blamed himself for his rather hedonistic year, his vanity and his weakness, for enjoying the gaudy nights—and some of them, he had to admit, he had enjoyed.
As he explored his old haunts, he felt a conflict of pleasures, wondering what was true or false, real or affected. He started to write some verse again, which he hadn’t done at Cambridge, and began a poem called An Evening Walk. His habit then, which continued throughout his life, was to compose aloud, trying out the lines in the open air as he strode along. There’s a nice, lightly humoured section in The Prelude about walking with his dog, or at least Mrs Tyson’s household dog on his return to Hawkshead. (Everything to do with Hawkshead in The Prelude is joyful—a joy to read and a pleasure to realize his joy—whereas other sections, such as that in Cambridge, are confused and melancholy.) The dog always walked with him, but a few paces ahead, and when it saw someone coming, it always turned and gave William notice, time to compose his face and gait, so that no-one would see and hear him in full spate and suspect he was crazy.
He bought an umbrella during his summer holidays in Hawkshead, putting it on his bill at Mrs Tyson’s, along with £2 17s for nine weeks’ board and 1s 6d for the hire of a horse. Even to this day, a man carrying an umbrella in the Lake District is thought a bit soft, but in 1789 it was positively effeminate. It must have been a habit he’d picked up in Cambridge, though even there it was something of a novelty. (The first man to carry an umbrella in the streets of London was Jonas Hanway in 1750; he was ridiculed by passers-by and abused by cabmen.) We don’t know if William took it with him around Hawkshead, which would seem very strange for an open-air boy. Perhaps he’d just bought it to stun them when he got back to Cambridge. It shows that even in his dress there was a conflict of styles.
He entered once again into the spirit of the rural social life, always having fancied himself when it came to dancing, and went to several ‘promiscuous routs’, whatever that meant. One assumes it referred to drinking rather than anything else, though one of his first impressions, on returning to Hawkshead, was to notice which pretty girls had gone plain and which plain ones were now pretty. The local yeomen farmers had barn dances, with the village fiddler doing his bit, and Wordsworth went to these. There was no social discrimination. The boys at the grammar school were still very much village boys, part of the community. But now he was a Cambridge buck, as far as the local quality could see, he also got invited to the smarter parties in the smarter houses by some of the smart, new people. Perhaps that was when he took his umbrella.
It is strange to realize that the Lakes were already attracting visitors. We tend to think of Wordsworth’s Lakes as being pre-trippers and preholiday homes, an undiscovered sylvan paradise, but the discovery of Lakeland coincided almost exactly with Wordsworth’s birth. The first guide-books, by people like West and Gilpin, appeared in the 1770s and were very successful. Wordsworth read them avidly. The poem he was now writing, An Evening Walk, showed the current fashion for landscape descriptions. The guides were meant for gentlemen, those with taste and discrimination, who were looking for the picturesque, who could be led to certain beauty spots and there feast their eyes or get out their paints and pencils and record the picturesque scene. These spots were called ‘stations’ and there was one not far from Hawkshead, overlooking Windermere, which Wordsworth was very fond of visiting.
Along with the gentlemen trippers came the first of the second-homers, the first wave of Lancashire industrialists who were already building or buying lavish holiday homes on the slopes of Windermere. They brought a completely new social class to Lakeland life. It had always been a fairly classless life anyway: the central dales were dominated by small-scale yeomen farmers (‘statesmen’, as they were called, because of their small estates), whereas the local aristocracy (feudal overlords, such as the Lowthers) lived on the fringes, in the plains of the Eden valley, well away from the mountains. The new, wealthy summer visitors gave big parties, regattas and hunts, organized fancy-dress balls and competitions for the best-decorated boats, and their daughters looked forward avidly to the holiday festivities. They weren’t all complete strangers to the area. Several families who lived in industrial west Cumberland, for example the Curwens from Workington, had for years possessed a country home in the Lakes. The Curwens had theirs right in the middle of Windermere, on Belle Isle.
There’s a nice contemporary letter, written in 1786, by a young lady living over in Bassenthwaite, Mary Spedding of Armathwaite Hall, whose brother John was at school with William, to a girl friend in Hawkshead with whom she’d spent a previous summer holiday. In the letter, she is complaining about the lack of suitable men for dances in her area. ‘So little Hawkshead still retains its superiority. I believe sc great a majority of Beaux can seldom be boasted of in this part of the world.’
William enjoyed the parties and dances and many a time spent al night at them, returning home in the early hours. It was after one such party, perhaps with the Curwens on Windermere, full of the usual dancing, gaiety and mirth, of maids and youths enjoying themselves, dancing the night away, that he had a strange experience as he walked home with the cock crowing, the birds wakening and the labourers going to their fields. It was a beautiful sunrise and the mountains looked as bright as clouds. During this walk, it came to Wordsworth that what he had to do in life was be a ‘Dedicated Spirit’. An unknown bone was given to him, one which it would be a sin to ignore. It wasn’t a great mystical experience, like others he describes in The Prelude: just a simple realization of his duty in life. He doesn’t even say it mean: he had to be a poet, though everyone accepts that’s what is meant. This dedication section has been scrambled over by countless scholars, looking for clues, and those who think it refers to Windermere have always been foxed by a line which says the ‘sea was laughing at a distance’. You would have to have had quite a few drinks to hear the sea from Windermere. Wherever the revelation took place, and however Wordsworth shaped the details afterwards, he suddenly saw clearly what he must do. Confused by these new conflicting experiences and sensations, Wordsworth made his choice for the conduct of his future life.
Back in Cambridge, he decided to create his own pattern of study for the next two years. From now on, he devoted his time to his own reading, including modern authors and modern subjects, and to learning foreign languages. It’s not clear how much he actually read, though he told everybody that was what he was doing, but he definitely took instruction in Italian from an old gentleman called Isola, who had been a friend of Thomas Gray at Cambridge. This was about the only teacher at Cambridge Wordsworth had any respect for. He seems to have despised the rest.
It was a brave thing to do, for an impoverished student: deliberately ruining all his chances of a proper and secure career. But from his early days William had been a rebel, headstrong and determined, whether he was defying his Penrith grandparents or his Cambridge teachers, demanding to be free to go his own way. Why did he not just leave, as many disenchanted students have done, before and since? The answer must be that, though he disliked the place, there was no money and nothing else for him to do. The future was obscure, so he might as well make the most of the present. He says in The Prelude, rather arrogantly, that he decided he was a Chosen Son, so why grieve or be cast down or even feel guilty?
Dorothy worried on his behalf, being most upset when she heard that he’d opted out of the Tripos course. In his second year he was ‘unplaced’, which meant he had not sat the full examination, though he had taken a paper in Classics and done quite well in that. In her regular letters, Dorothy reassured her friends, who were equally concerned about her wayward brother, that he was reading quite a lot and was ‘acquainted’ with French, Spanish and Italian.
The uncles were more than upset. They were furious. William had called in at Penrith, as he had done during his first long summer holiday from Cambridge, but hadn’t stayed long. Uncle Kit, after one of William’s brief visits, wrote complaining about his conduct to his elder brother Richard, now a young lawyer in London. ‘I should have been happy if he had favoured me with more of his company, but I’m afraid I’m out of his good graces.… I am sorry to say that I think your Bro. William very extravagant. He has had very near £300 since he went to Cambridge which I think is a very shameful sum for him to spend, considering his expectations.’
His family wanted him to stick to the Tripos and become a Wrangler, and that way his life would be secure, and his family and all his well-wishers happy; but William took no notice. Even his kind Uncle William, the Fellow of his college, began to despair of him.
The Master of the college died in March 1789. As was the custom of the day, literary-minded students from the college pinned on the coffin some nicely composed verses of appreciation. William, however, refused, saying he had had no connection with the dead man, nor any interest in him, so why should he write something. His uncle couldn’t understand it. Here was his nephew, who had given up all proper study because he was supposedly only interested in poetry, not taking an opportunity to distinguish himself by having his verse read by the Cambridge public.
William had become positively anti-clerical by this time. There is no evidence, either way, of any interest in religion while he was at school, nor in his early poetry, but at Cambridge he actively despised the old clerics and deans of the university, finding more wisdom and goodness in the old shepherds back in Hawkshead. Daily chapel attendance was compulsory at Cambridge, and the rules were strict in this, if in few other departments of Cambridge life. William found it all a mockery, a disgraceful and empty gesture, and he attacked it vociferously in The Prelude.
Perhaps William’s most defiant gesture during his Cambridge years was to go off in his last summer vacation, just a few months before the final examinations, on a holiday across France to the Alps. His relations still had hopes that he would come to his senses in his final year, see the light at last and catch up with some frantic holiday revising, as others had done, and in the end get some sort of respectable honours degree, enough for his good connections to ease him into a comfortable niche. He didn’t even tell Dorothy, his beloved sister, he was going, not until he’d set off. He knew that even she would think he was absolutely mad.…
We left Dorothy still having a hard time with the Penrith grandparents, but Uncle William came to her rescue, just as he had tried to come to William’s.
In William’s second year, Uncle William got married to the daughter of the vicar of Penrith and resigned his Fellowship to take up a rather well-appointed living in Norfolk, a gift of St John’s. The newly-weds asked Dorothy to come with them, to be a kind of housekeeper, and Dorothy jumped at the chance of leaving Penrith. On their way to Norfolk, they spent a few hours in Cambridge, and William was able to show Dorothy round the sights. Later on, he went to visit them in Norfolk, but it was by this time that his uncle was beginning to realize that William was not going to be the scholar he’d expected. Dorothy and William went for long walks, up and down the huge garden of the vicarage, discussing their idealistic plans for the future, their worries about the Lowthers and about whether they would ever get their right-ful inheritance. Dorothy loved such visits, but eventually her uncle made it clear that William was no longer a welcome visitor.
Dorothy made her home with her uncle and aunt for the next seven years, acting as a nurse to their children when they started to arrive, but she had to keep her contact with William as quiet as possible. Not only had he become unwelcome: it looks as if he was now thought to be an undesirable influence on young Dorothy, and someone of whom the family had become ashamed.
William’s and Dorothy’s joint fantasy at the time, which they discussed together and which Dorothy continually mentioned in letters to her close friends, was that one day they would set up house together, sharing life in a beautiful village—Grasmere is mentioned as one possibility—and be happy ever after, just the two of them.
Dorothy kept in touch with all her brothers—even Richard, a very tardy letter-writer, now in London—and with young John, now a sailor, who had just taken up a junior position on the Earl of Abergavenny and had gone on a voyage to the West Indies; but she was always closest to William. She did feel that, as five stranded orphans, they had to huddle together for protection, especially herself and the unloved William. It is not surprising that she should have created fantasies of a future life with her favourite brother. As a woman, she had no possibility of a career of her own. Her destiny lay either in going into service, getting married or living with one of her brothers.
There’s no record of any boy friends in her life, though one of her friends did tease her about the possibility of romance with Mr Wilberforce—yes, William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery philanthropist. He came to spend a month with her uncle, being an old Cambridge friend of his, and was very impressed by a little class that Dorothy was running at the time for local poor children, teaching them reading, spelling and knitting. Mr Wilberforce gave her ten guineas a year, to spend for the poor children in any way she wanted.
‘My heart is perfectly disengaged,’ she replied to her friend Jane Pollard in Halifax, who’d obviously made certain hints in her letter, on hearing what Mr Wilberforce had done. ‘I would make a confidante of you, had there been any foundations for your suspicions. Mr W would, were he ever to marry, look for a Lady possessed of many more accomplishments than I can boast.…’
There had still been only one girl in William’s life: the girl from his early Penrith schooldays, Mary Hutchinson; but she already seems to have become more of an old friend than a girl friend—someone he just happened to have grown up with. He did visit her during those first two Cambridge holidays when he went to Penrith. After all, he did like parties and dancing and was not unaware of girls being plain or pretty. But she, apparently, was on the plain side.
During his final year at Cambridge, he seems to have turned his back on thoughts of Mary, not visiting her any more, never contemplating a life with anyone else, apart from Dorothy. Was he simply being kind to Dorothy, stuck away in the country parsonage, or did he mean it? He certainly didn’t discuss everything with her, or she would have known beforehand about his final Cambridge holiday in France. Perhaps he feared she might worry about his future, as much as everyone else seemed to be worrying, and want him to devote his final vacation to his books.
He came back to Cambridge in October 1790, after his summer holiday in France and before the time to sit for his final examinations. ‘I am very anxious about him just now,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘as he will shortly have to provide for himself; next year he takes his degree, when he will go into orders I do not know, nor how he will employ himself. He must when he is three and twenty either go into orders or take pupils.’
In January 1791, William received his degree, an unclassified BA. He had not sat for the full examinations and so couldn’t get an honours degree. There was no possibility of a fellowship, which would have seen comfortably to his needs for the next three years, till he could be ordained—that is, if he was still going to be ordained. He had no idea what he wanted to do. The one or two remaining friendly relations talked of putting a curacy in his way, when the time came, and in her letters to her friends, Dorothy’s little dreams now took place in a parsonage, not a cottage, as she visualized the snug little parlour and bright little fire by which they would sit and converse together; but William had no such clear or clerical thoughts. Once he’d been admitted to his BA, he was on the road to London.
He was glad to get Cambridge behind him. From the very beginning, he had realized he was a stranger there. ‘A feeling that I was not for that hour, not for that place.’ That’s probably one of the best-known lines in The Prelude, though he has another phrase about Cambridge which is equally apt. Describing his last two years and his feeling of detachment, he says he decided to live like a ‘lodger in that house of Letters’.
It could be argued that Wordsworth was the failure at Cambridge—rather than Cambridge failing him, which is how it is often described. There is not one contemporary account of him at Cambridge by any of his fellow-students, which is surprising, considering how people usually manage to dig up and produce yellowing memories of people, once they are famous. He didn’t impress anyone sufficiently at the time for them to rush to their notebooks or diaries and jot down a few impressions. The only known reference is by an anonymous contemporary some three years later, who remembered Wordsworth as that chap who went on and on about the beauties of the Lake District.
He was a failure at Cambridge, in the sense of not passing the right examination. Even as a poet, he did very little, except for starting An Evening Walk, most of which he wrote in the holidays at Hawkshead. Cambridge was very much a fallow time. He might have felt secretly that he was a Chosen Son, but nobody else seems to have noticed. It has been suggested that he was discriminated against for his country ways and bucolic dress and manners, and that this could be one reason why he disliked Cambridge so much and why he was driven in upon himself. But there’s not much evidence for this and in The Prelude he does try to tell the truth, as he remembers it. We have to believe, therefore, his evidence which points to him choosing to turn Cambridge down. He tested it and found it wanting. In any case, quite apart from Wordsworth’s own reminiscences, there is overwhelming evidence of the low state of almost everything at Cambridge at that time. His wasn’t an isolated experience. Wordsworth’s often quoted remark about being in the wrong place at the wrong time is, with hindsight, peculiarly true. If he had gone to Cambridge a couple of years later, this might have made all the difference. But he was there at the nadir of eighteenth-century thinking and eighteenth-century dissipation. The ruling cliques, though corrupt and tottering, were still in control.
It was while Wordsworth was at Cambridge, after his second year, that the French Revolution broke out. On the actual day the Bastille was stormed, 14 July 1789, it looks as if he was on his way to Norfolk, to see Dorothy at his uncle’s parsonage.
Rousseau’s writings had a great effect on the whole of Europe, not just on France. Dissidents, in religion and in politics, had already started pressing independently for reform. Wordsworth, being a rebel at heart, judging from his boyhood and his Cambridge days, would have been attracted to any student radical movement or radical teachers, if he’d met any. Nothing and no-one of that sort appear to have come his way at Cambridge. They were there, in a minor form, but the heady days were to come a year or so later. As far as he was concerned, he was just passing through.
But Cambridge did have one good effect, albeit a negative one, on Wordsworth. It showed him what he wasn’t. It let him see he didn’t want to be a lawyer or a cleric, though it remained to be seen what form his dedicated spirit would take. It was a great revelation to him, being exposed to the world of Cambridge—a veritable culture shock for a young innocent from the hills to go amongst the wicked and the dissolute, so different from the world of nature. He was now able to see the value of Hawkshead. By going away, he was beginning to arrive.
Some lines from Book 3 of The Prelude about his early impressions of Cambridge.
Strange transformation for a Mountain Youth,
A northern Villager. As if by word
Of Magic or some Fairy’s power at once
Behold me rich in monies, and attir’d
In splendid clothes, with hose of silk and hair
Glittering like rimy trees when frost is keen,
My Lordly Dressing-gown I pass it by,
With other signs of manhood which supplied
The lack of beard. The weeks went roundly on,
With invitations, suppers, wine and fruit,
Smooth housekeeping within, and all without
Liberal and suiting Gentleman’s array!
We saunter’d, play’d, we rioted, we talked
Unprofitable talk at morning hours.
Such was the tenor of the opening act
In this new life. Imagination slept.
Some fears
About my future worldly maintainance,
And, more than all, a strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place. But wherefore be cast down?
Why should I grieve? I was a chosen Son.