DOROTHY WORDSWORTH was a remarkable woman. Most remarkable women, even the wealthy, lived unfulfilled lives in the nineteenth century. There was no formal education for girls; and no careers were open to them. Their duty was to be subservient—to their husband, or, if they didn’t marry, to their own families. There are countless examples, as Miss Austen has shown us, of exceedingly talented and intelligent women who, purely because they were women, were forced to live in the shadows of stupider, untalented brothers, depending on them for money and support. Some ladies did manage to become people in their own right, writing elegant novels or acting on the stage but they were the exceptions. Most women withered away, doomed to a life in the background, forever discussing trivialities.
Dorothy devoted her life to her brother, putting herself, strictly speaking, in the subservient role; yet, without Dorothy, would William have been the same person? Coleridge had an exceptional intellect, and a store of learning which helped William to form his own philosophy ; his mind was like a stone on which William could sharpen his own, rather rough-hewn mental blades. Dorothy was a spirit, a child of nature, an unformed, inspirational, intuitive being. William discussed the abstractions of literature and life with Coleridge, benefiting from his ability to quote chapter and verse from almost every known writer from the Greeks to the moderns, from the East to the West. With Dorothy, he could share the pleasures of the humdrum—children playing, birds singing, a rainbow, a distant cuckoo, a glowworm on a leaf, the cock crowing, a butterfly, the sun rising, the sun setting—the ordinary things we all see and hear and feel every day. Dorothy was all feelings, almost extra-sensory in her perceptions, often leading William to notice things and joys which otherwise he would have missed. No brother could in turn have been more grateful to a sister:
The Blessing of my later years Was with me when a boy:
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears,
And love, and thought, and joy.
Although Dorothy had had no education, and didn’t pretend to be an intellectual, she was a great reader, assiduously improving her own mind by going through the plays of Shakespeare. When William was away, she always settled down to some edifying work, such as teaching herself French or German. She took over the correspondence with Annette, to whom she must have written in French, as Annette couldn’t speak English.
Dorothy always felt deeply involved in her brother’s poetry. One of those first two published volumes, An Evening Walk, was dedicated to her, and though she could be critical with William himself, pointing out obscure words and passages, she stoutly defended him when others dared to criticize his work. Sarah Hutchinson, for example, once ventured her opinion that she found his poem ‘The Leech-gatherer’ tedious. ‘When you happen to be displeased with … any poem which William writes,’ wrote Dorothy in reply, ‘ask yourself whether you have hit upon the real tendency and true moral, and above all, never think that he writes for no reason but merely because a thing happened—and when you feel any poem of his to be tedious, ask yourself in what spirit it was written’ This was the sort of defence which Lamb had mocked; but, even today, it is a good guide-line when approaching all Wordsworth’s poetry.
Was Dorothy a poet herself? Many experts consider her as one. Ernest de Selincourt, the great Wordsworth expert, said she was probably ‘the most remarkable and the most distinguished of English writers who never wrote a line for the general public’. He was thinking of her private Journals which she kept at Alfoxden and in the early Dove Cottage years, a work not published as a book until as recently as 1958. It is a book greatly loved by all Wordsworth enthusiasts, lay and professional, and until now it has usually been the best-selling book every year at the Dove Cottage bookshop. It is a pleasure to read, but, personally, I prefer Dorothy’s letters. You see her thoughts and her opinions in her letters, as she sits down to tell her friend Jane, for example, about some incident, a journey, or people she has met. She has great insight into character, a strong narrative drive, a sense of humour and of the ridiculous, always vivid and colourful in her descriptions. Jane must have loved receiving the letters, and it is not surprising that she kept them, years and years before anybody was interested in knowing about Dorothy or her brother.
So much of Dorothy’s Journals, however, is unsatisfactory. She often lists events, but rarely stands back to comment on them. Nothing is explained. You have to know what was really happening in the Wordsworths’ lives to understand the sudden changes of location or of mood. The Journals were basically a diary, jottings written for Dorothy herself, and of course for William—not for the illumination or pleasure of outsiders. ‘Dullish, damp and cloudy—a day that promises not to dry our clothes. We spent a happy evening—went to bed late and had a restless night. Wm better than expected.’ That’s a typical entry, picked at random, describing their activities on Friday, 13 November 1801. What was so happy about that particular evening? What made the night restless? Why had she expected William not to be better? She doesn’t say. In a letter, she would have filled pages, describing such an evening’s activities, even if they had turned out to consist of only a game of whist by the fireside or of more worries about William’s bowels.
In her staccato style, she can go from some event we now know was vitally important, straight on to something completely mundane: ‘Monday, July 28, 1800. Received a letter from Coleridge enclosing one from Mr Davy about Lyrical Ballads. Intensely hot. I made pies in the morning. Wm went into the wood and altered his poems.’
Fortunately, in her Journals she records many days which merit more than two or three disjointed lines—days in which she sits writing for longer and goes into fuller descriptions, if still without any real explanations. It is these entries that make the Journals so special, such a joy to read, and are endlessly fascinating, for two important reasons.
Firstly, the Journals provide factual evidence of how important Dorothy was to William, the poet. When William came to write a poem (having gone through his tranquil stage of reflection, which could last for anything from a few hours to a few years), he very often used the same words that Dorothy had used originally in her Journals to describe an incident they had both witnessed. She wasn’t just a separate tool, but part of him, his amanuensis, sharing his creative force. Writers get a lot of help these days, from dictating machines to electric typewriters and computers, but it is going to be a while before someone invents a machine as efficient as Dorothy. As everyone who ever men Wordsworth always observed, lucky William. There are countless; examples, but the best known is probably also the easiest to give. Here is Dorothy describing their walk along the shores of Ullswater on Thursday, 15 April 1802: ‘I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.’
Now compare it with the first two verses of the poem William eventually wrote, two years later:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The second element in the Journals which has provided equal fascination is the light they throw on the relationship between William and Dorothy. She wasn’t simply his secretary, his note-taker, his copyist; she wasn’t just his pie-maker, his bed-maker, his health-watcher, his walking companion. Dorothy was more even than his critic and creative inspiration: she was his best friend. Their love for each other is what makes the relationship so extraordinary.
In those early years at Dove Cottage, they did have all those visitors, but, even so, the basic unit was William and Dorothy, sharing all the ordinary domestic pleasures. There’s a nice letter from William to Coleridge—an unusually light-hearted letter, describing the more ordinary aspects of their domestic life:
It is now past ten and we are both tired so that it is an absolute contest of politeness, with a little brotherly kindness interspersed, which of us walk up to Fletchers [the carrier] with this Letter and the accompanying parcel. We cannot both go as we have suffered Molly to retire and little Hartley [Coleridge’s son] cannot be left. These several displays of presence of mind in this antithetical way are highly entertaining. Dorothy is packing up a few small loaves of our American flour which I promised. It died of a very common malady, bad advice. The oven must be hot, perfectly hot said Molly the experienced, so into a piping red-hot oven it went, and came out black as a genuine child of the coal hole. In plain English, it is not a sendable article.…
Their life together in domestic bliss was obviously very happy. I nearly wrote ‘wedded bliss’. If you didn’t know they were brother and sister, the Journals would make you think they were married, judging by so many of Dorothy’s descriptions.
After dinner I read him to sleep. I read Spenser while he leaned upon my shoulder.…
I went and sate with W and walked backwards and forwards in the orchard till dinner time. He read me his poem. I broiled Beefsteaks. After dinner, we made a pillow of my shoulder. I read to him and my Beloved slept. I afterwards got him the pillows and he was lying with his head on the table when Miss Simpson came in.…
Read Wm to sleep after dinner and read to him in bed till 1/2 past one.…
After we came in and we sate in deep silence at the window. I on a chair and William with his hand on my shoulder. We were deep in Silence and Love, a blessed hour.…
When William was away, Dorothy was greatly distressed, missing him dreadfully, as if her whole world had collapsed. It was on such a day, at Grasmere in May 1800, when William and their brother John had gone off on a three-week trip, that she first began her Journal. She decided to take refuge in it, as a means of continuing their joint life; William could read it all when he came back: to catch up on their visitors and on her impressions:
Wm and John set off into Yorkshire after dinner, cold pork in their pockets. I left them at the turning of Low wood bay under the trees. My heart was so full that I could hardly speak to W when I give him a farewell kiss. I sate a long time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier.… I resolved to write a Journal of the time till W and J return and I set about keeping my resolve because I will not quarrel with myself and because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home.
Dorothy often went twice a day to Ambleside, over six miles there and back, and sometimes even further down the road, looking for the postman with letters from William. ‘The post was not come in. I walked as far as Windermere [the lake, not the town] and met him there. No letters! No papers. Came home by Clappersgate [on the northern shore of the lake]. I was sadly tired, ate a hasty dinner and had a bad headache. Went to bed and slept at least two hours.’ There was the utmost joy when William did return, and they sat up till four in the morning, just the two of them, and then slept till ten o’clock the next day.
On another occasion, when William was away, her desire for him was so strong that she went to his bedroom. ‘Went to bed at about 12 o’clock. I slept in Wm’s bed and I slept badly, for my thoughts were full of William.’ He came home rather unexpectedly and when someone told her he’d been seen on the road, ‘I believe I screamed.’
She was obsessed by William and he was devoted to her, loving her dearly, though his letters, such as they are, don’t furnish much evidence of passion. It is in his poems that his love for Dorothy shines through, even when William is using another girl’s name, such as Emmeline or Lucy, as was his normal habit. ‘Strange fits of passion,’ as we have seen, was written while he and Dorothy were alone together in Germany. ‘Among all lovely things my Love had been …’ was inspired by Dorothy and was about an incident, the finding of a glowworm, which they experienced together.
Was there more to it than a brother-sister love? Dorothy was certainly an emotional woman, given to outbursts, laughter and tears, and great shows of affection. There are references in her letters which show she loved Coleridge, or her brother John, almost as much as William. She addressed Annette effusively, as a dear and beloved sister, without having met her.
Accepted habits and signs of affection are bound to have changed in nearly two hundred years, and we would do well not to translate everything too literally into modern terms. William and Dorothy were orphans, after all. They only had each other. Physical contact between brother and sister was more normal then than it is today.
Nonetheless, and making all allowances, it was a rather strange, not to say intense, relationship. Their love appears almost suffocating at times, though there are no references in her Journals to any rows, or even a cross word. We can only guess at the climaxes, the highs and the lows, from the strange clues, but there are enough of these to indicate that at times the relationship verged on the unhealthy.
Dorothy was a virgin—of that there is little doubt—and there’s no reference to her ever having had a serious boy friend, in the courting sense. Coleridge loved her, calling her Wordsworth’s ‘exquisite sister’, and so did all William’s friends, each impressed by her mind and personality. Hazlitt was so enchanted by her, De Quincey later alleged, that he proposed to her, but Dorothy turned him down. Not even those who eventually fell out with William had anything nasty to say about Dorothy.
She was not physically very attractive, but in her early days that does not appear to have mattered, because her sheer physical presence was so striking. ‘Her face was of Egyptian brown,’ De Quincey recalled, ‘rarely in a woman of English birth had I seen a more determined gipsy tan. Her eyes were not soft, but wild and startling, and hurried in their motion. Her manner was warm and ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burned within her.’
One or two friends detected similarly ardent, even animal, feelings in William himself, though the only known incident in his life involving animal passion was his sudden and passionate love affair with Annette. He at least wasn’t a virgin.
Today, in this permissive, uninhibited, fully contraceptived age, it would be hard to imagine a healthy, attractive young single man staying celibate for ten years, from the age of twenty-two to thirty-two, unless he was a monk who’d taken vows or was homosexual. In ten long years, in the prime of his life, when he’d already had one passionate sexual affair, how could he have managed it? would be the modern reaction. He certainly met girls, entertained girls, visited houses where girls were living, admired a pretty face, and was well aware of the sisters of his male friends; but there’s not the slightest sign, so far, of any serious relationship since the Annette affair. We have to believe, then, that for ten years he was chaste. We have to believe that in those days young men—and young ladies—found it much easier to resist. Morals and methods were different, and it simply wasn’t considered a hardship. You might say this is how it should be. What’s so hard or reprehensible about being sexually pure? Why judge others by our shocking, decadent standards? All the same, one does wonder.
In the 1950s Mr F.W. Bateson, a well-known Wordsworth scholar and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, raised a suggestion that could help to explain William’s behaviour. William and Dorothy were lovers. If the discovery of the Annette letters caused a furore in the 1920s, it was nothing to the scandal caused by the theory of incest, which Mr Bateson discussed in his book Wordsworth, a Reinterpretation. This is a serious psychological study of Wordsworth’s poetry, suggesting that he was a much more subjective writer than is usually thought—just as much as Keats or Shelley. In his early life, writes Mr Bateson, Wordsworth was subject to strong sensual passions and emotions, which are in his poetry, if you look for them, though most readers have missed them (such as Shelley, for example, who called Wordsworth a ‘solemn and unsexual man’). Bateson cites as evidence one of Wordsworth’s two earliest books, Descriptive Sketches, where the poet experiences ‘voluptuous dreams’ by Lake Como and sees ‘shadowy breasts’, just like many a normal twenty-year-old. Wordsworth, however, expurgated these references when the poem was reprinted in 1820.
As for the possibility of incest, Mr Bateson pointed to Dorothy’s love-letters, the descriptions of physical contact between the pair, certain actions which would indicate panic (as things perhaps became too hot for William to deal with), and others which might betray guilt; but his main evidence rests on the fact that someone, at some later date, removed crucial passages from Dorothy’s Journals. This evidence is all rather circumstantial, and somewhat negative in that two missing pages from the original text, which Mr Bateson considers might contain evidence of incest, could be harmless. (In a later edition of his book, Mr Bateson rather softens some of his assertions.)
One day, some letters, at present unknown, might suddenly turn up, as with Annette, throwing completely new light on the whole relationship with Dorothy, revealing more precisely William’s true feelings. In the meantime, all that can honestly be said is that he and Dorothy were a very devoted and very loving brother and sister.
There then occurred an important event which spoils the incest theories, though no doubt someone could argue that it provides proof of guilt. In 1802, after two very devoted, intimate, domestic years alone with Dorothy in Dove Cottage, William got married.
If you relied solely on Dorothy’s Journals for enlightenment, you wouldn’t know what was going on. It is only when you look back, having got to the end and found that a wedding has taken place, that you can understand little remarks, half references, trips and letters which must obviously have been part of the build-up to the marriage. But Dorothy never says at any time that William has become engaged and that a marriage will take place.
One morning in July 1802, according to the Journals, we find that Dorothy and William have got up and are heading south for London. In a roundabout way, they turn out to be en route to France, which must come as a big surprise to any innocent reader. You’ve guessed, of course, where they are going. To see Annette.
If William is to get married, he must first disentangle himself from Annette, tell her face to face what he plans to do, discuss it with her and make appropriate arrangements. It sounds very much the sort of thing William would want to do, though no doubt his bride-to-be, who had been told about Annette, had also insisted. It was an interlude in his life which had preyed on his mind for many years. It needed a meeting to close it for good.
Because Dorothy offers no preparatory explanations in her Journals, the exact sequence of events can only be guessed at, though, from her letters to friends, it looks as if William had become engaged earlier in the year, probably in February. By good fortune, this year, 1802, turned out to be the only year for ten years that William could possibly have got back to France. In March 1802 the Peace of Amiens was signed, and for a brief period—it lasted for little over a year—England and France were not at war. Perhaps knowing that peace was coming encouraged William to get engaged. If the war had not halted, would he have got married without first seeing Annette? As recently as 1800, William had said he had no thoughts of marriage.
There was another event connected with his marriage—connected in the sense that it eased the thought of marriage and eased the separation from Annette, though whether it was in any way a cause or just a coincidence is again not clear. In May 1802, the bad Earl of Lonsdale, who had ruined the Wordsworths’ early years by his meanness, died. By July 1802, when William set off, the family knew that the new Earl planned to pay off all the old debts, and that the Wordsworth children should at last get their inheritance.
In London, while they were crossing the river on their way to the coast, Dorothy, as usual, made a note of their impressions. William later turned them into one of his best-known sonnets, that on Westminster Bridge. ‘We mounted the Dover Coach at Charing Cross. It was a beautiful morning. The City, St Pauls, with the River and a Multitude of little boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge. The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke and they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such pure light that there was even something like a purity of Nature’s own grand spectacles.…’
They were on their way to Calais, where they’d arranged their appointment with Annette. She was travelling up from Blois to meet them. Perhaps they thought it could have been dangerous for an English couple to venture too far into the heartland of France, just in case war should break out again. Perhaps they wanted a half-way, neutral, anonymous rendezvous. Their meeting took place on the sands at Calais, within view of the English coast—emotionally comforting no doubt, just in case things went too far.
We left Annette Vallon in 1792—heavily pregnant, waving a sad farewell to her lover, having come back to Blois in readiness for the birth. Before William left, she’d got him to touch and feel the baby clothes which she’d already bought. Judging by her subsequent letters, Annette could be as emotional and sentimental as Dorothy. William seemed to like emotional ladies.
During the previous ten years, other elements in her character had appeared, such as courage and strong beliefs. The Terror had been just as violent in the French provincial towns as in Paris, and in Orleans, which had been a noted royalist centre, the local Jacobins conducted a witch-hunt of royalist sympathizers. Annette’s brother, Paul Vallon, who stood godfather to William’s child, was one of thirty arrested for allegedly assaulting a local republican politician. Nine went to the scaffold, but Paul managed to escape and went into hiding. Annette helped to protect him and from then on became actively involved in the underground movement, hiding priests and royalists, organizing escapes, plots and hiding-places. She was constantly in danger of losing her own life, but though her name appeared in various records as a known royalist, working for counter-revolutionary movements, she managed to escape being put in prison. On one police file she was described as ‘Widow Williams of Blois; gives shelter to Chouans’.
She obviously had a great deal more to think about than her departed lover during these ten years, but it is interesting that she should have remained unmarried and called herself either Madame William or Veuve William. Her daughter had been christened Anne Caroline Wordwodsth (sic). William still appears to have been the only man in her life.
None of her letters appears to have got through to William after 1795, but they started arriving in late 1801, when negotiations for the Amiens peace were under way. Dorothy refers to letters arriving from ‘Poor Annette’, no doubt telling of her sufferings and dangers, but they are simply mentioned in passing, along with letters from other friends, such as Sarah Hutchinson.
William and Annette now had in common a hatred of Napoleon, who was then in Paris, having taken over control of France. It was on 15 August 1802, while the one-time lovers were walking up and down the Calais sands, that Napoleon made himself Consul for life. Many English people did go to Paris to catch a glimpse of the new hero, including Charles Fox and Thomas Poole, Coleridge’s friend, but doubtless William and Annette couldn’t face Paris and such celebrations. Annette hated Napoleon because her long years of work and sacrifice for the restoration of the Bourbons had now been ruined. William had had hopes after the collapse of the Terror that a true and liberal republican government would return, but now a new tyrant had arisen.
They also had in common nine-year-old Caroline. She romped and played on the beach while her mother and father went on their incessant walks. William wrote several sonnets in Calais and in one he refers to Caroline, calling her ‘Dear Child’, though it wasn’t known when the sonnet was published that he had such a child.
They spent four weeks in Calais, which seems an enormously long time for a simple farewell, while William’s bride-to-be was waiting at home for the wedding to take place. What could have taken up all their solemn talks? They would have had a lot of adventures to tell each other; but a gap of ten years imposes barriers, changes relationships, changes people. William’s French must have been quite rusty, while Annette knew no English. Did he still love her in any way? She was now thirty-six and had been through ten tough years. Was Dorothy there as a sort of chaperon, just in case?
Dorothy gives no clue to their conversations: ‘We lodged in tolerably decent sized rooms but badly furnished and with large store of bad smells and dirt in the yard and all about. The weather was very hot. We walked by the sea shore almost every evening with Annette and Caroline or Wm and I alone. I had a bad cold and could not bathe at first but William did.…’
Talk of the impending marriage probably didn’t take up much of their conversation, as Annette probably knew all about that already by letter, but Caroline and her future must have been discussed at length. William might even have offered to take her back to England. Dorothy would have enjoyed being a foster-mother. But after four weeks, they parted, Annette and Caroline going back to Blois. William did not see them again for eighteen years.
You may have guessed by now the name of the lady William was coming home to marry: Mary Hutchinson. Where his relationship with Annette had been short and ecstatic, had begun and ended in a matter of months—an exciting, if brief, moment of passion—his relationship with Mary had gone on slowly, and with little apparent passion, for years—in fact, for almost the whole of his life, if you remember that he first met her, when they were both about three, at Dame Birkett’s school in Penrith. Why did it take so long? What made him marry her when he did? These questions hardly troubled the scholars, until very recently. The discovery of Annette, and all the new possibilities that emerged from this, have been a much more exciting field for speculation. Few questions have been raised about Mary during the last hundred years because it has been thought that the answers would be fairly boring and unimportant. There has been so little evidence of her having had any influence on William’s life or poetry that she has tended to be dismissed as just a mother and housekeeper—someone he happened to marry, when he decided it was time to get married and to be the father of children.
Most people who knew Mary found her very quiet, and one observer remarked that she appeared to have a squint, which wasn’t very kind. Dorothy’s dark complexion, when that was remarked upon, was always seen as something wild and attractive. Wordsworth’s nephew, when he came to write the official family memoir, is strangely silent about Mary, giving no descriptions of her.
It is Dorothy who has left all the valuable letters and journals; Dorothy whom all visitors were impressed by; Dorothy who got written about by other people; Dorothy whom William wrote and talked so much about. This has been so much the case that it is thought by some people that William went to Mary on a complicated rebound from Dorothy—as an escape or release from the insulated, hot-house atmosphere of the two Dove Cottage years. It need not necessarily have been incest that brought about the change. Some sort of climax might have been reached with Dorothy, and William just didn’t want it to go on.
William and Mary had certainly been friends for many years, but, at the same time, he’d left her for many years, going his own way with other people, treating her simply as an old family friend. Even when she came to visit the Wordsworth household in the West Country, he’d left to go to Bristol on her arrival. From the letters, Mary would appear to have been Dorothy’s friend, not William’s, at that stage. He had no thoughts of marriage, to her or anyone else, just two years before the wedding. By 1802, Mary was thirty-two, the same age as William (he was just four months older), and, by the standards of the day, something of an old maid, presumed by all to be destined to spend her life as some sort of housekeeper to one of her brothers, just as Dorothy was doing.
The Hutchinsons had originally come from County Durham to Penrith, where Mary’s father had lived all his life. He was a fairly prosperous tobacconist in the town, which meant that she came from the same sort of shopkeeper stock as William’s mother’s family. He had eight children (plus two who appear to have died young), all of them orphaned while they were still growing up. (Mary’s mother died in 1783, the same year as William’s father died, and her father two years later.) The Hutchinsons felt they had a lot in common with the Wordsworths and, despite family separations, with both sets of children being sent away to relations, they kept in contact.
There were four Hutchinson sisters, all near in age to William and Dorothy—Mary, Sarah, Joanna and Margaret, the one who died—and four brothers, John, Henry (who went to sea), Tom and George. Mary was particularly close to Tom, who was a farmer. Tom had little money and was always trying to buy himself land and moving about; for a time he lived at Sockburn on Tees—where William and Dorothy visited them on their return from Germany—and then he moved to Yorkshire, where Mary was now living. Those trips by John and William to Yorkshire, referred to by Dorothy in her Journals, therefore have deeper significance, when you realize that William must have been courting Mary.
Dorothy was a dear and beloved friend of Mary’s and it was she who had kept up the letters over the years, much more than William; but she was genuinely upset when William was away visiting her, especially during 1801 and 1802. She need not necessarily have felt personal jealousy; perhaps she just feared for his muse, if he took on the responsibility for a wife and family.
In June 1802, when the marriage had been arranged, and William and Dorothy were about to set off for France, Dorothy wrote to her brother Richard, answering questions that he must have asked her about her own future with William:
His marriage will add to his comfort and happiness. Mary Hutchinson is a most excellent woman—I have known her a long time and I know her thoroughly; she has been a dear friend of mine, is deeply attached to William and is disposed to feel kindly to all his family.
As you express a desire to know what are my expectations, I have every reason to rely upon the affection of my Brothers and their regard for my happiness. I shall continue to live with my Brother William—but he, having nothing to spare nor being likely to have, at least for many years, I am obliged (I need not say how much he regrets this necessity) to consider myself as boarding through my life with an indifferent person. Sixty pounds a year is the sum which would entirely satisfy all my desires. With sixty pounds a year I should fear not any accidents or changes which might befall me. I cannot look forward to the time, when with my habits of frugality, I could not live comfortably on that sum.…
How reassuring not to have to take inflation into account! In those far-off days, one could see £60 supplying the same needs for forty years ahead. Dorothy’s financial hopes rested on her brothers Richard, John and Christopher, all now pursuing their respective careers; she hoped they would be kind enough to allow her £20 a year each, which they readily agreed to do. She had of course no job or income of her own, though that horrid Uncle Kit, the one who’d blighted William’s early Penrith years, had died, leaving nothing to William or any other Wordsworth son, but £100 to Dorothy. She apparently did not know at the time she wrote the letter quoted above (though she came to know soon afterwards) that she would be getting her share of the Lowther money.
Dorothy’s agitation of course did not spring from solely financial causes, and we can only guess at her real emotions. She’d welcomed Mary’s visits over the last few years, firstly at Racedown and then during those early months at Dove Cottage; Mary had been part of their circle. But Dorothy must have believed William when he’d said he had no thoughts of marriage. However, when it was decided, she immediately addressed Mary in all letters as her sister, as she’d done with Annette, accepting her as William’s bride-to-be. But underneath, what did she feel?
‘I have long loved Mary as a sister,’ Dorothy wrote to her old friend Jane, just a few days before the wedding was due to take place. ‘She is equally attached to me, this being so you will guess that I look forward with perfect happiness to this Connection between us, but, happy as I am, I half dread that concentration of all tender feelings, past, present and future, which will come upon me on the wedding morning.…’
The wedding took place at Brompton Church, near Scarborough in Yorkshire, on 4 October 1802, and Dorothy was right about the confusion of her feelings. Her description of the day is one of the strangest and most revealing accounts in the whole of her Journals.
She and William had arrived a few days before the wedding, and Dorothy had felt ill most of the time. The night before, she had slept with William’s wedding-ring on her finger. In the morning, when the time came to go to the church, she couldn’t face it:
At a little after 8 o’clock I saw them go down the avenue towards the church. William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring—with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before. He slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently.
I kept myself as quiet as I could but when I saw the two men [Mary’s brothers] running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer and threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything, till Sarah came upstairs to me and said ‘They are coming’. This forced me from the bed where I lay and I moved I knew not how straight forwards, faster than my strength could carry me, till I met my Beloved William and fell upon his bosom.…
It was a very quiet wedding, apart from Dorothy’s hysterics. There were no senior members of the Hutchinson family there, just three of her brothers and two sisters. The Hutchinson children, like the Wordsworths, had been placed under the care of guardians when their parents died, including a wealthy, landed uncle, from whom Mary had high hopes of some financial help, but they cut her off when she married William. One of them described him as a ‘vagabond’. Like William’s own guardian uncles, they considered William a waster, a rebel with no proper employment. They might possibly have heard rumours about his French affair. Whatever the reasons, the couple received not one single wedding present. William even signed a marriage bond, in which he agreed to pay £200, should it ever come to light that there was any impediment to his marriage. Did someone suspect that perhaps he might even be married already?
After the wedding, all three came straight back to the Lakes, William with his bride Mary and his sister Dorothy, where all three lived happily ever after.…
William and Dorothy crossed Westminster Bridge on 31 July 1802, on the way to Calais. Dorothy made notes of their impressions. William later wrote a sonnet.
EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!