WORDSWORTH loved London, but he also hated London. Even when he loved it, he hated himself for loving it. He knew he could never really live there, but its loveliness and its hatefulness always fascinated him. It is an archetypal provincial reaction, one that is still with us, but Wordsworth at least put his impressions on paper. His descriptions of wandering round London, observing street life, the theatres, the shows, the public spectacles, are some of the finest passages of observation in The Prelude. Poets of the day, when they described London, saw only its grandeur. Wordsworth, like Dickens later on, saw only too clearly its seamy side as well.
As a young boy in Hawkshead, he’d been mesmerized by the idea of London, like most country folk. He once fell eagerly upon a crippled boy at his school who had been on a visit to London, pumping him for information, but unfortunately the boy couldn’t remember anything. He didn’t even look different. Wordsworth was most disappointed. His own images of London consisted of processions, the Royal Palace, dukes, kings, Dick Whittington and the notion that next-door neighbours in the same street don’t know each other’s names. Some images never change.
The reality of the crowds, the squalor, the freaks, the cheap entertainment, the maimed and the beggars appalled him when he eventually saw them, but even so, the city at night, when the great tide of human life stood still, had almost a hypnotizing effect on him. He clearly saw the follies of the public men, the postures of the politicians, yet in the vast receptacle of London, ‘living amid the same perpetual flow of trivial objects, melted and reduced to one identity’, he managed to feel the Spirit of Nature come upon him.
London drew from Wordsworth, in The Prelude, one of his few pieces of humorous—well, faintly satirical, or perhaps gently teasing—writing. It was about a vicar in a fashionable church who had a particularly fruity accent, the sort of contorted, affected voice which is still common in fashionable London churches.
However, William didn’t have so much time for standing around listening and staring as he’d had on his previous visit. He was now fired with revolutionary fervour, and with a desire to get his two poems published: Descriptive Sketches, which he’d finished in Orleans and which contained a lot of pro-revolutionary writing, and his Lakeland landscape poem, An Evening Walk. These two poems, his first published volumes, appeared on 29 January 1793. They seem to have been rather rushed through the press, considering he’d only been back in London a little over a month, but perhaps he knew beforehand that he had an interested publisher and this was probably one of the reasons he had given Annette for having to come back to London, hoping to get some money from his poems and so help her and the baby. The publisher, Joseph Johnson, had radical leanings and introduced Wordsworth to others of the same inclination.
‘It was with great reluctance that I huddled up those two little works,’ William wrote to a friend. ‘But as I had done nothing to distinguish myself at the University, I thought these little things might show that I could do something.’ They were exceedingly thin. An Evening Walk ran to twenty-seven pages, and was priced two shillings. Descriptive Sketches was fifty-five pages long, price three shillings.
An Evening Walk was addressed to Dorothy, but William doesn’t appear to have let her see the book before publication, completing it in London while she was still in Norfolk. (It was his practice later to listen to criticisms from Dorothy, and from other close friends, and he was for ever rewriting his verses.) When she did read these first published poems, Dorothy was very honest and forthright in her opinions, considering she was missing her beloved William so desperately and was longing to be with him: ‘The poems contain many passages exquisitely beautiful, but they also contain many Faults, the chief of which are Obscurity …’ She picked upon the word ‘moveless’ as an example of a fairly meaningless word which William had used three times, describing the motion of a swan gliding. Many years later, in a reprint, William removed the offending word.
The poems didn’t get much public attention. Only two magazines reviewed them in 1793, over six months after publication, and in each case the anonymous reviewer was pretty savage. ‘More descriptive poetry!’ complained the Monthly Review. ‘Have we not had enough? Must eternal changes be rung on uplands and woodlands, and nodding forests, and brooding clouds, and cells, and dells and dingles? Yes: more; and yet more; so it is decreed.’ The reviewer did end by saying there were passages which showed imagination and hope for the future, if the poet managed critically to question every line.
A third review appeared the following year, by a former Cambridge contemporary of William’s who happened to be visiting the Lakes, and this was much more complimentary; but the poems were indeed rather derivative in style, showing the influence of Pope and Goldsmith and with heavy eighteenth-century overtones, though in Descriptive Sketches William had broken some new ground. But that hint of ridicule by that first critic followed Wordsworth for the rest of his life, whenever his poems were reviewed. At the same time, unknown to him, there were several young people who heard in the poems a new voice and a new attitude. Unfortunately, their interest didn’t show in the sales or in public appreciation. The two slim volumes made hardly a ripple and brought William little money, certainly not enough for him to contemplate a career as a poet.
For the next two years, as with the previous six, he had no idea what he was going to do with his life. He would probably have taken holy orders, now that he was twenty-three, despite having put it off for so long, and having complained about and generally disapproved of the Church; but his relatives now stopped trying to persuade him and finally withdrew their offer of a curacy. It is not clear if William himself told them about his affair with Annette, or whether he got Dorothy to do it, but it looks as if it was this news that caused them finally to wash their hands of him and William was henceforth banned from visiting his reverend uncle in Norfolk. He’d had to tell them, because his uncles controlled the purse-strings and he needed money, some for himself and some to send to Annette, which he planned to do as soon as he had any and as soon as he could get it through. They were horrified at the very idea of him marrying Annette, a Catholic, and then moving, along with the bastard child, into some little parsonage which they themselves would have to provide. This was Dorothy’s latest little romantic notion, which she outlined in letters to Annette. Her dream cottage now contained herself, William, Annette and the baby Caroline, though the wish was no nearer fulfilment than it had ever been.
William thought for a while of becoming a soldier, as he had delusions that he was meant to command people, but that didn’t last long. He thought, over the next couple of years, of beginning a literary magazine, with a London friend putting up the money. He saw himself writing nice little articles about moral philosophy, politics, the arts and gardening. Apart from commanding people, he also fancied he had a talent for telling people how to lay out their gardens. On one occasion he made enquiries about being a political reporter, though he had few delusions about this, being well aware that he was without knowledge or experience of newspaper work. ‘There is still a further circumstance which disqualifies me for the office of parliamentary reporter, viz, my being subject to nervous headaches which invariably attack me when exposed to a heated atmosphere or to loud noises and that with such an excess of pain as to deprive me of all recollections.’ Very true. All reporters know that feeling.
He had hopes of becoming a tutor to some young gentleman, for which he was reasonably well qualified, with his Cambridge degree, such as it was, and his first-hand knowledge of Europe and of the French and Italian languages. He considered going to Ireland to be tutor to Lord Belfore’s son in the summer of 1793, but the post had gone before his letter of application arrived.
It is impossible to know exactly how he lived over these two years, as he wandered around, with no fixed abode. He was based in London for about half of the time, but he made long tours elsewhere. There’s a theory that he went on a secret visit to Paris at the end of 1793, perhaps trying to see Annette. It’s based on the fact that he told Thomas Carlyle, many years later, that he’d seen with his own eyes the guillotining of Gorsas, which took place on 7 October 1793, but Wordsworth was never completely reliable on dates and no firm evidence has come to light.
During the first six months of 1793, on his return from France, he was seriously involved in radical politics, a cause which obsessed him for the next three years, but at the same time confused and confounded him and added to his general feeling of unhappiness and depression.
In the same week as Descriptive Sketches was published, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed, and a few days later England was officially at war with France, a war which went on, apart from one brief period of peace, for the next twenty-two years. William’s guilt about Annette was now mixed up with guilt about England. The terror of the Revolution, and all the bloody excesses, had alarmed and disappointed the more romantic, peaceful radicals in Britain, though they still supported the theory of revolution and pressed for reforms in England. But the announcement of war was a great shock. Could they now betray their own country? The government of the day certainly considered the pro-French agitators as traitors. Young men down from the universities were suddenly inflamed by ideas of equality; they wanted the abolishment of the monarchy in England, the repeal of oppressive laws and an end to the power of the Church and of the aristocracy. The government was sufficiently worried about the possibility of revolution at home to suspend the Habeas Corpus Acts. Several agitators were arrested. Richard Wordsworth, William’s brother, advised William in a letter to be very careful about his associates.
William attended a lot of meetings, sat up all night arguing, and avidly read the radical pamphlets and books which were being produced in London, such as Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, and in the early stages he did actively support the idea of an English revolution. He didn’t actually do much about it. He was there in spirit rather than deed, though he did produce one piece of political invective, a strange but powerful piece of writing which was addressed to the Bishop of Llandaff, the notorious Cambridge absentee professor and bishop. The bishop had printed one of his sermons with the unbelievable title of ‘The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor’—at least, it was unbelievable to young radicals like Wordsworth. The bishop defended all English rules and traditions, saying that parliamentary reform was unnecessary, the peasants were quite happy, and what had happened in France was disgusting.
The basis of William’s long letter was an attack on the British monarchy and constitution, and it is interesting, in view of his personal problems, to see him attacking the legal system: ‘I congratulate your Lordship upon your enthusiasm for the judicial proceedings of this country. I am happy to find you have passed through life without having your fleece torn from your back in the thorny labyrinth of litigation … or the consuming expense of our never ending process, the verbosity of unintelligible statutes and the perpetual contrariety in our judicial decisions.’ Down with the Lowthers, in other words.
William had evidently moved away from thoughts of war or of active revolution as a means of bringing about reform, which he appears to have supported earlier. He’d now decided that war was a disaster because it was the poor who always suffered most, as he’d seen in France. In his letter, there’s a strain of puritanism which was to grow stronger as the years went on. He attacked the system which allowed prostitution to deluge the streets, though he appears to be defending the poor, who are driven to ‘that promiscuous intercourse to which they are impelled by the instincts of nature, and the dreadful satisfaction of escaping the prospects of infants … whom they are unable to support’. Was he thinking of Annette and his own child?
The letter was never published. Perhaps Johnson, his radical publisher, saw the harm it could do Wordsworth and for his sake refused to print it. It would have been easy enough to have become a martyr in 1793.
William already had enough problems. He had no job, no training, no money, no home. The only person he could have turned to was living with relatives who had disowned him. His first attempt to realize his self-professed spirit of dedication had failed. Nobody appeared to want his poems. He was a staunch republican, a friend of France, in love with a French royalist girl by whom he’d had a child; but there he was, stuck in England, forced to watch helplessly while his own country went to war with France. Yet, while despising his own country, he was beginning to worry about what was happening in France, his newly adopted country. It certainly wouldn’t ease his confusions and depressions if his left-wing, republican pamphlet was published—and if he ended up in prison.
Meanwhile, Dorothy was cut off, in splendid rural isolation, ensconced in the comfortably old-fashioned eighteenth-century clerical life, safe in the sleepy Norfolk parsonage, away from such horrid modern topics as revolution, political agitation and war. But she wasn’t happy either. William was not just banned from the house—even talking about him was discouraged. They couldn’t have such a good-for-nothing, disgusting character mentioned in the house, not when such respectable friends as William Wilberforce, now a great Evangelical reformer, might arrive to see them.
Dorothy was busy enough. Her aunt and uncle now had four young children whom she helped to care for. She had her endless letters to write, to her old friend Jane in Halifax, or to dear William and her other brothers. The Reverend William Cookson’s clerical career was advancing steadily, and he was given a temporary position at Windsor, where he was soon appointed a canon. The whole family, together with Dorothy and two maids, moved to Windsor for three months. The Reverend William, of course, had had royal connections when, as a young Fellow of St John’s College, he’d been a tutor to some of the royal children.
Dorothy wrote some delightful letters about her impressions of Windsor. She used to hang around the terrace at Windsor Castle, watching George III (not long recovered from his first attack of apparent insanity) and the other members of the royal family coming in and out, when she was walking with the children. She was delighted by the friendliness and informality of the King and Queen. ‘I say it’s impossible to see them at Windsor without loving them, because at Windsor they are seen unattended by Pomp or State.’ On two occasions the King stopped to admire Dorothy’s little charges. ‘Mary he considers a great Beauty and desired the Duke of York to come from one side of the Terrace to the other to look at her. The first time she appeared before him she had an unbecoming and rather shabby hat on. We then got her a new one. “Ah,” he says, “Mary that’s a pretty hat!” ’ While Dorothy was basking in these royal contacts, William was of course dreaming of bringing the royal family down.
Although William couldn’t visit Dorothy in Norfolk, their youngest brother Christopher, still at Cambridge, did come to see her there. ‘He is like William; he has the same Traits in his Character but less highly touched; he is not so ardent in any of his pursuits. William has a sort of violence of Affection if I may so term it which demonstrates itself every moment of the Day when the objects of his affection are present with him, in a sort of restless watchfulness which I know not how to describe.…’
Dorothy’s vision of herself and William being together one day was still very clear to her, and in this same letter she again describes the sort of winter evenings she will one day have with William—closing the shutters, setting the tea table, reading books by the fire:
Oh Jane, with such romantic dreams as these I amuse my fancy during many an hour which would otherwise pass heavily along. I cannot help heaving many a sigh of reflection that I have passed one and twenty years of my life and that the first six years only of this time was spent in the enjoyment of the same pleasures by my brothers. We have been endeared to each other by early misfortune. We in the same moment lost a father, a mother, a home; we have been equally deprived of our patrimony by the cruel Hand of lordly Tyranny. These afflictions have all contributed to unite us.
The image of life with William never goes from Dorothy’s letters, though it fades now and then: ‘I cannot foresee the Day of my Felicity, the Day which I am once more to find a Home under the same Roof with my brother. All is still obscure and dark and there is much ground to fear that my Scheme may prove a shadow, a mere Vision of Happiness.’
During these years, she never appeared for one moment to think of life with another man, of being married: ‘I am very sure that Love will never bind me closer to any Human being than Friendship binds me to you my dearest female Friend and to William my earliest and my dearest Male Friend.’
Dorothy’s love for William, whom she now hadn’t seen for over two years, since before he went to Orleans, is absolutely total, yet at the same time, as with his poetry, she is not blind to his faults:
Do not expect too much of this brother of whom I have delighted to talk so much. In the first place, you must be with him more than once before he will be perfectly easy in conversation; in the second place, his person is not in his favour, but I soon ceased to discover this, nay I almost thought that the first opinion that I formed was erroneous. He is, however, certainly plain than otherwise, has an extremely thoughtful countenance, but when he speaks it is often lighted up with a smile.
It makes one wonder what Annette thought of William when she first saw him, if he took such getting to know.
It looks as though Dorothy had plans to tell her confidante Jane about William’s scandalous affair: ‘I have not time or room to explain to you the foundation of the prejudices of my two Uncles against my dear William. The subject is an unpleasant one for a letter, though I must confess that he has been somewhat to blame … it will employ us more agreeably in conversation.’
Dorothy was hoping to see Jane soon, for she’d worked out a plot with William. She’d got permission from her uncle to be away from Norfolk for a while in the summer and had made secret plans to meet William at Halifax, though Jane had to say nothing about this in her letters and had to keep it all secret. It wasn’t to be known by anyone that she was also going to see William again.
William wanted to see Dorothy, the only person who had ever stood by him, through thick and thin, ever since he’d been born, who without question understood and sympathized with his moods and his views and his problems, yet who had a mind of her own, a critical yet constructive mind, who saw flaws and sensed feelings he often missed. He shared her romance of that little country cottage. He too wanted to be with her. Since Annette, no-one had come along, either male or female, to share his soul. But, things happened. He put off the secret meeting in Halifax for a month, then another month, and so it went on for six months.
The first thing that happened was a piece of luck. His hopes of talking some lord into letting him tutor his son had failed, but an old school friend from Hawkshead, William Calvert, suddenly asked him to accompany him on a tour of the West Country, all expenses paid. William Calvert, and his young brother Raisley, had inherited a sizeable fortune on the death of their father, who had been steward of the Duke of Norfolk’s properties at Greystoke, near Penrith. (The same Howard family is still there, but the duke lives elsewhere.) It is an indication of how well off the young Wordsworths might have been, as their father had had a similar job with the Earl of Lonsdale. William jumped at the chance. His political life in London was becoming very intense. No jobs, or opportunities for publication, had come his way. Inviting William on a tour of anywhere was like offering a drunkard a drink.
First, they dallied on the Isle of Wight for a month, where he watched the boats go by, and then they headed west. While near Salisbury, Calvert’s whisky, the coach in which they were travelling, was involved in an accident and broke into smithereens—or ‘shivers’, as Dorothy described it. Calvert decided to return north on the horse, while William, ever the adventurer, set off north on foot, a wander which he managed to spin out for weeks. He had a three-day visionary experience on Salisbury Plain, imagining all sorts of terrifying sights: human sacrifices, Druids and blood-stained altars. The vision probably owed a lot to the terror of the Revolution—the guillotining and massacres—allied with the personal horrors throbbing round his mind at the time.
William worked his way along the Welsh border, visiting Tintern Abbey (though he didn’t write about it on this visit), and then went to North Wales and the valley of the River Clwyd, to visit his old walking friend Robert Jones, now a cleric. Despite frittering his time away at Cambridge, along with Wordsworth, Jones had now settled down. He had taken a respectable teaching job till he was twenty-three and able to be ordained. William also had Jones’s delightful sisters to see once more. In such a hospitable atmosphere, he sat down and wrote his poem, ‘Salisbury Plain’.
He eventually got going again, and met William Calvert back on the Calvert family farm, Windy Browe, near Keswick, on the slopes of Skiddaw, where Calvert was staying with his brother Raisley. William also visited a few other old friends, such as the Speddings of Armthwaite (the family of another old schoolfellow, who also had charming sisters), and visited his Wordsworth relations down the coast at Whitehaven. It wasn’t until February that William finally managed to get across to Halifax and have his long-awaited secret reunion with Dorothy.
‘Oh my dear sister, dear sister, with what transports of delight shall I again meet you, with what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.’ These had been William’s pretty words, in a letter to Dorothy some eight months earlier, when the secret meeting was first planned, but of course the Calvert trip had intervened. There may have been other obstacles which kept them apart, such as that possible trip to France. In a letter sent after his arrival in Halifax to a friend in London, he wrote, ‘I have been doing nothing and still continue to do nothing; what is to become of me I do not know.’ There is no doubt, however, that his feelings for Dorothy were sincere and that after all the delays and procrastinations he did rush to her arms, when at last they did meet again.
William and Dorothy spent about six weeks with their relations and friends in Halifax and then, in the spring of 1794, they ran away together. That might seem rather an emotive phrase, considering they were siblings, and perhaps even an unnecessary one, as they were both adults; but there is a hint of an elopement. Dorothy did have obligations to her Uncle William who had taken her in and saved her from her awful life in Penrith. Her role as an unmarried, impecunious member of a large family was to stay at home and help those relations, such as her clerical uncle, who had children or large houses or both. Her uncles were her guardians and she was beholden to them for help and money, till the Lowther debts were settled. She had had a little windfall on the death of her grandmother, and her big brother Richard, the only brother so far with a proper career, was kind and sent her occasional presents. Young John was doing well at sea, sailing round the world on various ships, but he’d still only risen to fifth mate. She had to heed her uncles, who certainly didn’t want her running around with a ne’er-do-well like her brother William.
Nonetheless, William and Dorothy went off, on foot, heading for the Lake District. In those days, it was considered an extraordinary sight for a young lady to be seen walking anywhere. ‘I walked with my brother at my side, from Kendal to Grasmere, eighteen miles, and afterwards from Grasmere to Keswick, fifteen miles, through the most delightful country that ever was seen.’ Unlike William, Dorothy had never lived in the Lakes, having spent her adolescence in Penrith, Halifax and then Norfolk. They were aiming, once they got to Keswick, for the Calverts’ farm, which had been put at their disposal. They spent an idyllic two months in and around the Lakes, with endless walks and visits to old friends of William’s, like the Speddings. Dorothy found the Spedding daughters absolutely charming. ‘They have read much and are amiable and engaging in their manners. We have been staying there three nights and should have stayed longer if Mrs Spedding had not been going from home.’ It wouldn’t of course have been proper in those days for young men to be in the same house overnight with unattended young ladies, even if they were over twenty-one.
While Dorothy and William were in their Keswick retreat, staying at the Calvert farm, one of her aunts, Mrs Crackenthorpe, the wife of the disagreeable Uncle Kit, wrote what must have been a pretty strong letter of censure, judging by Dorothy’s reply:
I am much obliged to you for your frankness with which you have expressed your sentiments upon my conduct and am at the same time extremely sorry that you should think it so severely to be condemned. In answer to your suggestion that I may be supposed to be in an exposed situation, I affirm that I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection, and besides I am convinced that there is no place in the world in which a good and virtuous young woman would be more likely to continue good and virtuous than under the roof of these worthy uncorrupted people.
The Calverts and their tenant farmers were indeed good and worthy people; but the Calverts themselves weren’t there, having left William and Dorothy, with their own quarters, to fend for themselves.
‘I am now twenty-two years of age,’ continued Dorothy, ‘and such has been the circumstances of my life that I may be said to have enjoyed his company only for a very few months. An opportunity now presents itself of obtaining this satisfaction, an opportunity which I could not see pass from me without unbearable pain.’
It was during their stay at Windy Browe that Dorothy began copying out ‘Salisbury Plain’ for William—the first time she’d acted as his secretary and copyist, a job she eventually turned into a lifetime’s occupation.
They left Windy Browe after about a month and went down the coast to see their Whitehaven relations, paying a visit to their old Cockermouth home on the way. ‘All was in ruin, the terrace walk buried and choked up with the old privet hedge which had formerly been so beautiful—the same hedge where the sparrows used to build their nests.’ How typical of that beastly Lord Lonsdale to have let the house become empty and overgrown, almost as another slight to the Wordsworth family.
William still hadn’t found any employment, though he was again in correspondence with his London friend about a possible new magazine. Their money, such as it was, eventually ran out. Dorothy was forced to return to living with relations once again, this time near Barrow, while William went back to the Calvert house, where young Raisley Calvert was seriously ill and needed a companion.
Raisley, though not of a literary inclination himself, had been most affected to learn from William of his struggles and of his attempts to write poetry. He’d obviously heard many times about the awful Lowthers and about how William was penniless and would never be able to dedicate his life to poetry in the way he wanted. To all intents and purposes William had so far been something of a failure. Nevertheless, Raisley saw in William a spark of genius, or at least a spark of something out of the ordinary—enough for him to promise William that he would share his income with him. Few people until this time had seen such a spark in William, apart from Dorothy, and all she got for her devotion was a severe ticking-off from her relations.
But Raisley Calvert had promised more than to share his income with William. He vowed to leave him a legacy of £600: enough for him to live on without having to follow a profession. No wonder William hurried back when he heard he was ill.
It was thought that after a holiday abroad, with William as his companion, Raisley would soon recover. This plan greatly appealed to William. Lisbon was chosen, well away from all the awful troubles in France. William had never visited Portugal, a country which was also very popular with English people at the time, and he relished the prospect of being Raisley’s paid companion on such an exotic tour. They set off from Keswick in October 1794, but had only got as far as Penrith, not exactly a glamorous town in William’s eyes, when they had to turn back because of Raisley’s health. For the next three months, William was stuck at Keswick, morally obliged to nurse Raisley.
William looked after Raisley, who had just turned twenty-one, with care and attention, but in his letters to his London friends he betrays signs of definite irritation. He obviously felt trapped. He couldn’t leave Raisley, his benefactor-to-be, not when he was so needed, but at the same time, Raisley had never been an intimate friend. It was his first: chance for years, since leaving Cambridge, of having enough money to be able to do what he really wanted. At least he now knew what he wanted, to write poetry and be with Dorothy, but there seemed little: chance of achieving it, without some amazing piece of luck, such as Raisley Calvert dying … His thoughts and motives must have been very mixed and very morbid.
William found himself in something of a panic when he discovered that, if and when the money was left to him, he might have it immediately taken away from him. His Uncle Richard in Whitehaven, one of his two legal guardians, had just died, and his uncle’s children claimed that William owed them £460, the money their father had advanced to him at Cambridge. It was a topic which was to split the family for years, and William could clearly see the terrible possibilities. While he was impoverished, they would simply have to wait. But if he came into £600 from Raisley, they could legally claim almost all of it for themselves at once.
William wrote desperate letters to his brother Richard, who had now assumed responsibility for handling the Wordsworth family affairs. He asked Richard if he would make a bond to pay the debt of £460 for him, out of his own money, so that when William received Raisley’s £600, he could have all of it to live on and be free. One of these years, when he had more money, he promised he would pay Richard back. It was a large favour to ask his brother—a shadowy figure in life, except when it came to financial matters—but Richard handsomely agreed.
Then there was a further panic when Raisley Calvert, now on his death-bed, became fed up with his local family solicitor and decided to write out a new will by himself. Raisley talked of increasing his promised legacy from £600 to £900, which must have pleased William, but it could all go wrong, right at the last moment, if Raisley, so William wrote in great agitation to his brother, made his new will in an irregular manner: ‘What I have further to say is to ask whether it would not be proper for you if possible to come down immediately so as to see that the will is executed according to form. At all events no time is to be lost as he is so much reduced as to make it probable he cannot be on earth long.’
The situation had now become macabre, with William hovering in a panic around the dying youth, but eventually Raisley managed somehow to make his will to William’s satisfaction, and William was able to tell his brother there was no need after all to come up from London. Raisley died in January 1795, and the sum of £900 was left ‘to my friend William Wordsworth’. It took some time for the money to come through, and it did so in dribs and drabs, but William’s immediate financial future was now assured.
It was a rather eerie episode, which, if examined closely, doesn’t show William in all that wonderful a light. He didn’t scheme or in any way precipitate the legacy, but he made sure that matters worked out to his advantage. ‘I had had but little connection,’ he admitted later about his relationship with Raisley, ‘and the act was done entirely from a confidence on his part that I had powers and attainments which might be of use to mankind.’
There’s another interesting sidelight on William’s feelings and opinions at that time, as revealed in his letters to London, stuck as he was up in Keswick, wondering how he’d got himself into such a position, sitting by the death-bed of someone he hardly knew:
I begin to wish much to be in town; cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions, besides I have not even much of their conversation as I am so much with my sick friend and he cannot bear the fatigue of being read to. Nothing indeed but a sense of duty could detain me here under the present circumstance. This is a country for poetry it is true, but the muse is not to be won but by the sacrifice of time, and time I have not to spare.
He was a young, impatient man, it is true, caught in an emotional situation, but who would have thought you could catch William Wordsworth ever criticizing the Lakes? But, when life is in a state of flux, you can float many ways and all ways, and display feelings and inclinations which later you might not care or be able to remember.
William didn’t immediately rush to Dorothy to set up their dream cottage somewhere, as one might have imagined, now that he had some money. Instead, he went straight back to London, where another stroke of good luck soon befell him, though at first he was caught up again with his old radical friends, which brought him only more worries and confusions. He became a disciple at this period of William Godwin, the political philosopher whose work and books he had admired since his return from France. He sat at his feet for several months, talking with him into the night with other young Cambridge graduates. Godwin’s complicated philosophy of reason appealed to him. He believed, for example, that good people could sin, could do wrong, yet still be good. This notion attracted William, thinking perhaps of Annette or of the tortuous thoughts he must have had by Raisley’s bedside. Godwin was also anti-marriage, which must have sounded attractive, though in 1797 Godwin himself got married, to Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer and early feminist. (Their daughter Mary was the future wife of Shelley and the author of Frankenstein.) Much has been made of the many influences Godwin had over William during these few months, but once a chance appeared to get away, William took it immediately and was gone.
It came through his friendship with an old Cambridge contemporary, Basil Montagu, with whom William went to live on his return to London. Montagu was the natural son of the Earl of Sandwich and his mistress, Martha Ray, a singer who’d been shot dead some years earlier outside Covent Garden Theatre by a former lover, a vicar from Norfolk. It was a great scandal of the time—of any time—and James Boswell is said to have accompanied the vicar in the mourning coach on his way to his execution at Tyburn.
Basil Montagu was studying for the bar, but was also taking in pupils to pay his way as his wife had died and he was trying to combine work with bringing up his two-year-old son, also called Basil. He had been a great and good friend of William’s for many years, though a slightly eccentric, disorganized, impulsive one. He was constantly hard up, and William gave him £300 of his Raisley Calvert legacy in a lump sum, in return for an annuity which Montagu promised to pay him at ten per cent. It sounds a foolhardy thing to have done, but William was looking for some way to invest his money and give himself a regular income.
Through Montagu, William got to know two of his pupils, the Pinney boys, who, like young Raisley Calvert, were very impressed by William’s spark of originality and his efforts as a struggling poet. They offered William the use of their country home, Racedown Lodge in Dorset, for him and his sister to live in rent-free. Their family home was a big house in Bristol where their father lived, a prosperous sugar merchant, with plantations in the West Indies.
Dorothy was absolutely thrilled when she heard that William was being offered a country cottage—and wanted her to join him. She had gone to visit her old friend Mary Hutchinson and her family in Durham, and had then moved back to the Halifax relations. She never returned to her clerical uncle and his family in Norfolk. Perhaps he’d washed his hands of her, as well as of William.
At last, her long-held dream was about to come true. Not only had they got a rent-free cottage, even if only for a short time, but they had also two sources of income. Basil Montagu was arranging for his young son to go with William and Dorothy to Racedown. For looking after him, he was going to pay them £50 a year. They were also going to have another child in their care, a natural daughter of one of their Myers cousins—a love child, as they called them in those days.
With the money paid them to look after the two children, plus the income from Calvert’s legacy, Dorothy calculated that they would have about £170 a year. To William and his sister this seemed a fortune. Their luck had turned. The years of wandering and indecision, and of being dependent on the ill grace of others, seemed over. Dorothy could already see the parlour, the cosy fire. Together, at last.
From Book 7 of The Prelude, Residence in London.
These are grave follies: other public Shows
The capital City teems with, of a kind
More light, and where but in the holy Church?
There have I seen a comely Bachelor,
Fresh from a toilette of two hours, ascend
The Pulpit, with seraphic glance look up,
And, in a tone elaborately low
Beginning, lead his voice through many a maze,
A minuet course, and winding up his mouth,
From time to time into an orifice
Most delicate, a lurking eyelet, small
And only not invisible, again
Open it out, diffusing thence a smile
Of rapt irradiation exquisite.
This pretty Shepherd, pride of all the Plains,
Leads up and down his captivated Flock.