YOU may recall Wordsworth’s horrid remarks about that new house being built in Grasmere, the ‘abomination’ which would ‘ruin’ his beloved vale. This was the house, Allan Bank, into which he moved in 1808.
It’s a large, handsome, detached house, set in its own grounds just outside the village of Grasmere, under the slopes of Silver Howe, on the other side of the Grasmere Vale from Dove Cottage. It has subsequently been altered, but as residences go, it was and is much more desirable than the little cottage at Town End, not just in size but in its superior position, raised slightly above the village, without that rather enclosed, rather dampish, claustrophobic feeling which lingers over the houses in the valley bottom, especially on damp, rainy days—which, alas, are a feature of the Vale of Grasmere. The Wordsworths took it because nothing else was available and its size was perfect for their large household. They grew to like both it and Mr Crump, whom they’d earlier disparaged. William even came back especially from a trip to Penrith, just because Mr Crump wanted some advice on laying out the gardens, and all of them enjoyed picnics with the Crump family on Grasmere island.
They needed a large house because, as Dorothy half boasted in a letter, they regularly found themselves a family of fifteen people. It had all started with just William and Dorothy, but now they were a veritable commune. Firstly, there were William and Mary and their four children—the fourth, another girl called Catherine, was born in September 1808, a few months after they’d moved into Allan Bank.
Then there were Dorothy and William’s sister-in-law Sarah Hutchinson, which makes eight so far. Coleridge was another permanent guest, plus Derwent and Hartley at weekends (which makes eleven); then Mrs Coleridge and her daughter Sara came for a week or so at a time (bringing the number to thirteen), and the two servants bring the total to fifteen. That’s not taking into account the outside visitors, especially in the summer, who often stayed several weeks.
When Lady Holland, the fashionable London hostess, made her tour of the Lakes with her husband, calling on William en route, as part of what was becoming a statutory itinerary for rich tourists, she didn’t ask to stay with the Wordsworths, but invited William out to dinner at their hotel. He went, and regaled them with his views on the latest developments in Lakeland—how he hated white houses and buildings which ruined the scenery. Lady Holland was much taken with him, but her diary contained a rather back-handed compliment: ‘Much superior to his writings, and his conversation is even beyond his abilities. I should almost fear that he is disposed to apply his talents more towards making himself a vigorous conversationalist.’
Since it wasn’t often that people said William was good in conversation—unlike Coleridge—and usually noted that his forte was the monologue, this doesn’t say a great deal for Lady Holland’s opinion of his writings.
Coleridge had his own room at Allan Bank and it was here that he worked out plans for the Friend, a ‘Literary, Moral and Political Weekly Paper, excluding personal and party politics and the events of the Day, conducted by S.T. Coleridge of Grasmere’. William rallied in support and wrote to his new smart friends, including Walter Scott and Lord Lonsdale, asking them to take out subscriptions, which became a little embarrassing when after six months the magazine still hadn’t made its first bow, despite the subscriptions having been paid. Coleridge, as ever, needed time to settle, going off to Penrith and Kendal for weeks at a time, negotiating the printing and the buying of the stamped paper which was needed to post copies to subscribers, before finally getting down with Sarah to producing the first issue, which appeared in June 1809. To everyone’s surprise, particularly the Wordsworths’, new issues kept on appearing—if only just—and Allan Bank became a hive of happy industry, with most of the womenfolk busy provisioning and cleaning and bringing up the assorted children, and the men working hard and soberly at their creative writing.
William turned increasingly to prose in the next few years, perhaps partly on the rebound from his reviews, but partly to help Coleridge with his magazine. He almost filled several issues with a long tract on his ‘Advice to the Young’, telling them how to conduct themselves, morally and spiritually, in these unsettled times, and he also wrote a long essay on epitaphs. Perhaps his most important prose work, which he threw himself into with enormous passion, was his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra. It was based on an international political row, now long forgotten and too complicated even to begin to unravel, which concerned the British Government having allegedly let down Spain and Portugal in their fight against the French oppressors, withdrawing their troops when they could have helped them more. Even at the time, the details had almost been forgotten when William finally published his pamphlet, as he’d taken so long correcting and recorrecting the proofs. Coleridge, like Southey, was in agreement with his views, and was all ready to march and sign petitions and organize meetings of protest; but he realized that, because of the delays, Wordsworth had missed his chance with his political appeal and was probably also going to fail with his moralizing in general.
‘Had I not known the author I would willingly have travelled from St Michael’s Mount to Johnny Groat’s house on a pilgrimage to see and reverence him,’ Coleridge wrote to Stuart, editor of the Courier, who had published William’s introductory essays on the same subject.
But from the public I am apprehensive, first, that it will be impossible to rekindle an exhausted interest respecting the Cintra Convention and therefore that the long porch may prevent readers from entering the Temple. Lastly, I fear that readers even of judgments may complain of a want of shade and background; that it is all foreground, all in hot tints, that the first note is pitched at the height of the instrument and never suffered to sink.…
It was a good reflection on much of William’s work, not just his prose. Coleridge was slightly wrong about the pamphlet in that it was quite well received by the handful of critics who bothered to notice it; three of them praised William’s humanity, while regretting some of his verbal faults. Canning was reported to have considered it the ‘most eloquent production since the days of Burke’. But Coleridge was right about the public’s reaction. Most of the five hundred copies printed remained unsold. ‘Many copies were disposed of by the publishers as waste paper and went to the trunk makers,’ Christopher Wordsworth reported in the Memoirs.
It was a very impassioned appeal to humanity in general to defend the poor and unprotected, over and above its concern for a passing political event, and it was reprinted during the First World War, in 1915, by a publisher who thought it could be used to rally enthusiasm for the war against Germany. (He said it helped a lot.) It reveals a great deal about Wordsworth’s political views at the time—and also about the power of his passions. He was a most emotional man, often carried away by causes and grievances, campaigns and ideologies. The Cintra campaign went on for months and for a time took up all his energies, what with writing to Lord Lonsdale, trying to get his help, sending copies of his pamphlet to the Portuguese and Spanish ambassadors, and walking along the road to Keswick at two o’clock one morning, desperate to find the carrier with the newspapers and the latest intelligence from the Iberian struggles.
From now on, William was involved in many other passionate causes, in widely differing fields—always sure that he was in the right. He took up the cause of education, for example, at about this time, convinced that an educationalist called Dr Bell, with his so-called Madras system, using pupil-monitors to teach the children, was going to be the saviour of humanity. He wrote many letters on his behalf and for a few months taught according to Dr Bell’s methods at the local school in Grasmere.
Then there was the simple, straightforward humanitarian campaign he organized for a local poor family, the Greens, whose parents had perished in the snow on the fells, leaving six orphaned children. The Wordsworths took in one of them, Sally, as a sort of nanny for their own children, agreeing to house and feed her and be responsible for her well-being, and they launched an appeal for £500 to secure a future for the rest of the orphans. It was a most stirring and heartening campaign, which was a huge success. They wrote to all their well-off friends, such as Lady Holland, who organized a collection from the members of her own circle (which included the Duke of Devonshire), and she sent them £32 which she’d raised in two-guinea subscriptions. Walter Scott sent an unsolicited donation.
Dorothy wrote a little pamphlet about the Greens—graphic, heartbreaking and going into the whole family saga—which was sent round to likely subscribers. Several people said she should publish it, but she declined, saying that would only bring the six orphans too much personal publicity, which might affect their future lives. They closed the appeal at £500, when more could possibly have been raised, not wanting to overdo it.
William’s passions (and several of them ran concurrently) were either ideological or humanitarian. There were no signs any more of animal passions, no fleshly sins or vices, not even any luxuries or self-indulgence.
When he was down in London that time, trying to rescue Coleridge from his sick bed, they all attended a little party at the Courier offices, given by the editor. Coleridge was there, and Southey, plus Charles Lamb and a few others. As they were leaving, Lamb, in his jocular way, remarked that everyone would now be going out into the streets to ‘make up to the first pretty girl he sees’. Only William questioned this light-hearted speculation. ‘Sad Josephs are some of us in this very room,’ replied Lamb.
Some chinks slowly began to appear in the image of the one big happy family, all working away together at Allan Bank. Firstly, their original criticism of the workmanship of the house itself was proving to be correct. Despite endless modifications, the fireplaces were found to be badly built and, once winter came, the whole house was constantly full of dirt and dust. ‘Smoky house, wet cellars, workmen by the half dozen make attempts, hitherto unsuccessful, to remedy these evils,’ Dorothy wrote.
There was one stormy day in which we could have no fire but in my brother’s study and that chimney smoked so much that we were obliged to go to bed with the Baby in the middle of the day to keep it warm and I, with a candle in my hand, stumbled over a chair, unable to see. We cooked in the study, and even heated water there to wash dishes. The Servants, you may be sure, have been miserable, and we have had far too much labour, and too little quiet. At the height of the storm, Mrs Coleridge and her little Girl were here, and Mr Coleridge is with us constantly, so you will make out that we were a pretty large Family to provide for in such a manner. Dishes are washed, and no sooner set in the pantry than they are covered with smoke. Chairs, carpets, painted ledges of the room, all are ready for the reception of soot and smoke, and are never clean.
Mr Coleridge was also beginning to prove troublesome. He was soon up to his old habits, taking to the bottle and other stimulants, falling ill, staying in bed all day, accusing everyone of being against him. Dorothy, for long his champion, was betraying signs of growing irritation in her letters to friends, though, having severely criticized Coleridge, she usually gave them instructions to keep it all private. Even William, writing to Coleridge’s old friend Thomas Poole, was becoming rather harsh in his attitude:
You will consider me as speaking to you now in the most sacred confidence and as under a strong sense of duty. I give it to you as my deliberate opinion, formed upon proofs which have been strengthened for years, that he neither will nor can execute anything of important benefit to himself, his family or mankind. Neither his talents nor his genius, mighty as they are, nor his vast information will avail him anything; they are all frustrated by a derangement in his intellectual and moral constitution … nor is he capable of acting under any constraint of duty or moral obligation.… The Friend cannot go on for any length of time. I am sure it cannot.… The disease of his mind is that he perpetually looks out of himself for those obstacles to his utility which exist only in himself. I am sure that if any friend whom he values were in consequence of such a conviction as I have expressed, to advise him to drop his work, he would immediately ascribe the failure to the damp thrown upon his spirits by this interference. Therefore in this way nothing can be done.… Pray burn this letter when you have read it.
In February 1810, Sarah decided to leave, having had enough. ‘We shall find a great loss in her as she has been with us more than four years,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘but Coleridge most of all will miss her as she has transcribed almost every Paper of the Friend for the press. The fact is that he either does a great deal or nothing at all. He has written a whole Friend more than once in two days … and he generally has dictated to Miss Hutchinson who takes the words down from his mouth.’
Sarah went off to stay with her brother Tom, who was now farming in Wales, and Coleridge managed somehow to produce one more issue of the Friend, the 28th number, in March 1810. It was the last to appear.
We have no hope of him—none that he will ever do more than he had already done [wrote Dorothy]. If he were not under our Roof, he would be just as much the slave of stimulants as ever; and his whole time and thoughts are employed in deceiving himself and seeking to deceive others. He will tell me that he has written half a Friend, when I know that he has not written a single line. I am loathe to say it, but it is the truth. He lies in bed till after 12 o’clock and never walks out … he goes [to his room] the moment his food is swallowed … sometimes he does not speak a word. The Boys come every week and he talks to them especially to Hartley but he never examines them in their books. He speaks of the Friend always as if it were going on … do not think it is his love for Sarah which has stopped him in his work—do not believe it; his love for her is no more than a fanciful dream, otherwise he would prove it by a desire to make her happy. No! he likes to have her about him as his own, as one devoted to him, but when she stood in the way of his gratifications it was all over. I speak this very unwillingly and again I beg, burn this letter.
What a sad household. Ten years previously, romantically roughing it in the West Country, William might have put up with the responsibility of having a drug addict in the house, but now, with his many commitments and his new sense of propriety and moral duty, it became unbearable. Coleridge was poisoning the whole family. He wasn’t just letting William and Dorothy down, but all the friends and contacts whom they had persuaded to help him set up the Friend. You can so clearly see the poison seeping through all their letters from Allan Bank. They’d grown quite fond of Mrs Coleridge over the last year or so, feeling sorry for her, and they quite enjoyed her regular visits, when she came to see the boys; but they were beginning to feel slightly resentful, as they realized that they, not Coleridge’s wife and family, were having all the trouble looking after him. Dorothy wrote:
Sara [Coleridge] is to stay with us till next Monday when her Mother will come and spend three or four days here.… Mrs C. is desirous to put off the evil day, for she dreads the contamination which her lady-like manners must receive from our rustic brood worse than she would dread illness. As to poor little Sara, she has behaved very sweetly ever since her Mother left her, but there is nothing about her of the natural wildness of a child.… Mrs C. does not look as if any of her cares have kept her awake, but she says she sleeps badly; however this may be, she is very fat and looks uncommonly healthy.
The problem was at last solved when Coleridge, after a spell back in Keswick at Greta Hall, as a guest in his own home, was offered a room by Basil Montagu, William’s old friend, in his London house. Montagu had been to stay at Allan Bank and had taken pity on Coleridge’s pathetic physical and mental condition. Montagu was now married to his third wife—the previous two having died—and was at last prospering as a lawyer. William and Dorothy had taken in his child, all those years before, when he himself had been having a hard time. Now he and his wife had a large London house and felt they could provide a room in it for Coleridge, and, with the aid of their family doctor, perhaps manage to rehabilitate him, though it seemed obvious to most people that he was almost beyond recovery. In October 1810, Coleridge climbed into Montagu’s carriage and headed for London …
The Wordsworths breathed many sighs of relief and returned to their normal life, at last being able to give proper attention to some new friends who had come into their lives in the last couple of years, especially a young gentleman called Thomas De Quincey.
Just as Coleridge moved off stage, at least for the moment, De Quincey had moved on—a young, very healthy, very eager young man, almost as well read as Coleridge, and, as far as they could see, with none of Coleridge’s unsavoury propensities for stimulants such as opium.
It was through a fan letter that De Quincey became known to William. The first known fan letter to him had been from that Glasgow university student, John Wilson, who had recently followed up his correspondence by moving into the Lake District, taking a house on Lake Windermere with his mother. He was a very wealthy young man, literate and talented, yet at the same time a great athlete, a lover of all Lakeland sports, very fond of outings and expeditions, and the Wordsworths went on several of his picnics and boating trips. Wilson also interested himself in the Friend, and William’s rather pompous and long-winded articles, ‘Advice to the Young’, were written in reply to a letter in the Friend from Wilson, asking Wordsworth, the sage, to offer the fruits of his wisdom.
De Quincey sent a similar fan letter. He was a mere stripling of seventeen at the time, about to go up to Oxford. This was in 1803, after he’d read the two-volume edition of Lyrical Ballads, and he wrote to William, via Longmans (William’s publishers), to say how he’d been enslaved by William’s poetry for two years. ‘The whole aggregate of pleasure I have received from some eight or nine other poets that I have been able to find since the world began falls infinitely short of what these two enchanting volumes have singly afforded me.’ The mere thought of meeting Wordsworth had rescued him from despair during the last two years, but what chance had he to meet him? ‘What claim can I urge to a fellowship with such society as yours, with genius so wild and magnificent?’ He added that he was just a boy, ‘but that my life had been passed chiefly in the contemplation and worship of nature’.
De Quincey was indeed only a boy, but the use of the word ‘nature’ was a little misleading: he had been living for many months with the down-and-outs in London, consorting with drug addicts and prostitutes, until his money had run out. He was born in Manchester, the son of a wealthy merchant who had died when De Quincey was seven. He went to Manchester Grammar School, where he’d been brilliant at Latin, but had run away. William was so impressed by De Quincey’s sensitivity and language that he wrote a letter in reply, adding an invitation to visit him at Grasmere.
Nearly three years later, during which time De Quincey had continued to idolize from afar Wordsworth and Coleridge, he made an attempt to take up the standing invitation. He got as far as Coniston, where he spent the night at an inn, but gave up out of shyness and returned to Oxford.
In 1807, however, he managed to get himself introduced to Coleridge, who was staying with friends in Somerset, before his arrival at Allan Bank. De Quincey knew all Coleridge’s work by heart, and they had three hours of philosophical and intellectual dicussion. De Quincey arranged to make an anonymous gift of £300 to Coleridge, doing it through a third party and saying it was ‘from a young man of fortune who admired his talents’. Coleridge had to go to London, to do some lecturing, so De Quincey offered to squire Mrs Coleridge and the children by coach back up to the Lake District. And so, in November 1807, De Quincey at last met Wordsworth—almost five years after being first invited.
Their first stop in the Lakes had been at Dove Cottage. The three Coleridge children—Hartley (nine), Derwent (seven) and Sara (five)—were all very excited, and Hartley ran ahead as they approached the gate. De Quincey could hardly contain himself. ‘This little cottage was tenanted by the man whom, of all men from the beginning of time, I most fervently desired to meet—that in less than a minute I should meet Wordsworth face to face. I did tremble.’
De Quincey’s account of the great meeting, in his Recollections of the Lake Poets, is perhaps the most readable description ever written of Wordsworth, if rather waspish:
He was, upon the whole, not a well made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs; not that they were bad in any way which would force itself upon your notice—there was no absolute deformity about them; and undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisition; for I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles—a mode of exercise which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and other stimulants; to which indeed he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is excellent in his writings. But, useful as they have proved themselves, Wordsworth’s legs were certainly not ornamental; and it was really a pity, as I agreed with a lady in thinking, that he had not another pair for evening dress parties—when no boots lend their friendly aid to mask our imperfections from the eyes of female rigorists.
De Quincey was excellent with the Wordsworth children, inventing games and amusements for them. He was also very good with the womenfolk—chatting to them, accompanying them on little trips, squiring them on social occasions when William wouldn’t go. On his first visit he stayed for a week.
Eventually, when the Wordsworths moved out of Dove Cottage, De Quincey took it over and held the tenancy for the next twenty-eight years. Dorothy made him curtains, and his moving-in was remembered for the never-ending books that continued to arrive in packing cases for several months in succession. He was very proud to be a resident of Grasmere—one of the literary Lakers at last—and thrilled by the beauty of Dove Cottage and by life in Grasmere.
When the lake froze over in winter, he watched the Wordsworths skating. De Quincey, ever observant of William’s physical appearance, wasn’t as enchanted by William’s skating as he himself was: ‘He sprawled upon the ice like a cow dancing a cotillion.’ De Quincey was fascinated by William’s marriage and by his whole attitude to women. He just couldn’t imagine William ever being head over heels in love with a woman:
I could not conceive of Wordsworth as submitting his faculties to the humilities and devotion of courtship. That self surrender seemed a mere impossibility. Wordsworth, I take it upon myself to say, had not the feelings within him which makes this total devotion to a woman possible. There never lived a woman whom he would not have lectured and admonished under circumstances that should have seemed to require it; nor would he have conversed with her in any mood whatever without wearing an air of mild condescension. Wordsworth, being so, never could in any emphatic sense, have been a lover.
If only De Quincey had known about Annette, what a surprise he would have had! He surely didn’t know, because in his Recollections he mentions William’s stay in Orleans, but gives no hint of the affair. And De Quincey, who repeated and enlarged on every piece of gossip, would certainly have used it in his book, as he spared nobody’s feelings. But this was how he now found William—a prematurely aged and rather stiff, self-centred man, surrounded by doting women.
Whatever De Quincey may have thought of William’s personality, he always had a very high estimation of his work and rejoiced in all his success and good strokes of fortune: ‘A more fortunate man, I believe, does not exist than Wordsworth.’
Dorothy was particularly fond of De Quincey, though William tended to treat him rather more formally. In letters to him, for example, he would refer to his wife as ‘Mrs Wordsworth’, whereas he called her Mary in writing to his old friends, like Coleridge. He used De Quincey very much as an extra secretary, finding him very helpful, for example, in seeing his Cintra pamphlet through the press in London.
De Quincey often stayed at Allan Bank, while Coleridge was there, for weeks at a time, either because work was being done on Dove Cottage, or because it was too crowded with his latest purchase of books, or because they all wanted him to stay in the family, playing with the children and helping with the latest literary project.
‘We feel often as if he were one of the Family,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘He is loving, gentle, and happy—a very good scholar and an acute Logician—so much for his mind and manners. His person is unfortunately diminutive, but there is a sweetness in his looks, especially about the eyes which soon overcomes the oddness of your first feeling at the sight of so very little a man. John sleeps with him and is passionately fond of him …’
De Quincey was devoted to all four Wordsworth children—even to Catherine, the baby of the family. Dorothy wrote: ‘Mr De Quincey has made us promise that he is to be her sole Tutor; so we shall not dare to show her a letter in a book when she is old enough; and you may expect that she will be a very learned lady, for Mr De Q is an excellent scholar. If however he fails in inspiring her with a love of learning, I am sure he cannot fail in one thing. His gentle sweet manners must lead her to sweetness and gentle thoughts.’
The fifth and final Wordsworth child was born in May 1810. He was another son, and they decided they would after all use the name William, despite their previous hesitations, though he was always known as Willy, which stopped any possible confusion with his father. The depth of love and affection for their young learned friend Mr De Quincey is shown by the fact that he was made one of the godfathers, the other being John Wilson, the fellow fan. It must have been great comfort to the Wordsworths, in their problems with Coleridge, to have had the charming Mr De Quincey so constantly in attendance.
During that coach trip to London in October 1810, Montagu started to tell Coleridge a few of the personal words of wisdom and warnings that William had imparted to him before they’d left Grasmere. Perhaps on their overnight stops Coleridge had already displayed some of his more annoying personal habits and Montagu was just trying to warn him, to make him sober up and mend his ways, and it was out of temporary exasperation that he repeated what William had told him in confidence. Montagu had always been a rather idle gossip, thoughtlessly repeating things—not really out of malice, more out of amusement. Whatever the provocation, it was on this journey, so Coleridge maintained, that Montagu told him some of the awful things William had said: Coleridge had become an ‘absolute nuisance in the family’; he was now a ‘rotted drunkard’ who had ‘rotted his entrails out by intemperance’.
This was the beginning of one of the best-known literary rows of the nineteenth century. There were many to come—Dickens and Thackeray were embroiled in equally juicy rows—but the London wits and witlings got particular pleasure out of this one, watching the two leaders of the new school, whom they didn’t like anyway, coming to verbal blows.
William, alas for him, didn’t know anything at all about Coleridge’s grievance for months. All winter, he dined out in London on the terrible indignities he’d been forced to suffer, telling everyone about his utter mortification that the friend whom he’d dearly loved—had, in fact, given his whole life and being to for so many years—had secretly hated him and had wanted him out of his house, after he, Coleridge, had given William years of ‘consummate friendship’ and had been ever ‘enthusiastically watchful’ over his literary fame. ‘Yet the events of the last year have now forced me to perceive—no one on earth has ever LOVED ME … So deep and rankling is the wound which Wordsworth has wantonly and without the slightest provocation inflicted in return for 15 years self injuring Friendship … that I cannot return to Grasmere or its vicinity.…’
The Wordsworths didn’t hear any of this from Coleridge—which wasn’t unusual, as Coleridge in the past had often not written or replied to them for months. It wasn’t until the following spring that they heard some of the allegations from the Charles Lambs, but they didn’t take much notice at first, Dorothy assuring Lamb that there was certainly no coolness towards Coleridge on William’s part. But in May, Mrs Coleridge let them see a letter she’d received from her husband, in which he inferred that William had caused the disarrangement of his mind. ‘Coleridge has been driven to madness by Wordsworth’s cruel or unjust conduct towards him,’ Dorothy said, reporting the allegations.
William wrote to Mrs Coleridge, explaining that all he’d done was warn Montagu that Coleridge had one or two habits which might spoil his tranquillity. He asked her to pass the message on to Coleridge. He didn’t want to write directly to Coleridge, who hadn’t conveyed his displeasure directly to him. Mrs Coleridge said she was too frightened to do what he asked, and she shouldn’t have shown her letter to the Wordsworths in the first place.… And so it went on, with the row building up through third persons, Coleridge becoming more manic and William gradually realizing the whole matter had got out of hand and was doing serious damage to his reputation.
In February 1812, Coleridge came up to the Lakes on a brief visit, to clear up the business side of the closure of the Friend. He picked up the boys from their school at Ambleside, and then drove right past the Wordsworths’ house in Grasmere on his way to Keswick, with little Hartley pointing and shouting and wanting to go and see his friends; but Coleridge refused to stop or even look. News of that incident was soon all over London.
Dorothy felt very sorry for William, the butt of all Coleridge’s slanders, after all the things William had had to put up with throughout the years, such as going down to London that time when Coleridge was supposed to be very ill. ‘Poor William went off, in consequence of his having solemnly assured Mrs Coleridge that he could not live three months more, and when William arrived, he had to wait daily for admittance to him, till 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and saw no appearance of disease which could not have been cured.’
In the end, William went down to London once again, in April 1812, ‘with a determination to confront Coleridge and Montagu upon this vile business’. At first, Coleridge refused to see him. There were yet more letters, and much to-ing and fro-ing, as Lamb and others tried to act as mediators. Finally, it was Henry Crabb Robinson, a new friend of Wordsworth’s, a minor literary figure trusted by both sides, who brought about a reconciliation of a sort.
William had, indeed, said some pretty tough things about Coleridge, but he denied having said the exact words which Montagu was supposed to have relayed and, anyway, what he did say had been said in confidence, not to be repeated. It was really all Montagu’s fault. Wordsworth and Coleridge shook hands and went for a long walk to Hampstead in May 1812, talking peacefully and amicably, two rather worn-looking gentlemen, now more worldly-wise and a little more cynical than in those first heady days of their passionate friendship. William was now forty-two and looked it, having for a long time appeared much older than his years; while Coleridge was just a few months away from his fortieth birthday, but looked at least fifty, sickness and intemperance having prematurely aged him.
In many senses, they had failed each other. Coleridge’s genuine love and admiration for William’s genius had turned to bitterness as he abused his own genius and his own body, becoming jealous of his friend’s success, energy and, most of all, domestic happiness. Coleridge failed William because he’d failed himself. William had loved his friend equally and those years of separation had been agony for him, wishing desperately that Coleridge would return, convinced that all would be well again, that Coleridge would once again stimulate and inspire him, and that their life together, wherever it might be, would blossom and flourish as it had done in the past. Whether he also admired Coleridge is more in doubt. There’s no record of any lavish praise by William of Coleridge’s talent—nothing like the praise Coleridge poured forth on William. And as for Coleridge’s character, William had doubts and worries about his friend’s moral fibre from the earliest days, and was aware of his weaknesses and his vices.
Coleridge also saw clearly, from the earliest days, that there were differences between them. In 1803, a rather bitter and malicious literary friend from London had spent a depressing evening with them at Dove Cottage, and Coleridge wrote afterwards about how the evening affected him: ‘This had produced a very unpleasant effect on my Spirits. Wordsworth’s mind and body are both of a stronger texture than mine; and he was amused with the envy, the jealousy, and the other miserable passions that had made their Pandaemonium in the crazy Hovel of that poor Man’s heart-but I was downright melancholy at the sight.’ One of the most remarkable features of Wordsworth, throughout his life, was his soundness of mind and body. His stability was an enormous strength.
When Coleridge could no longer give anything to William, because of his own mental and physical state, it was then, even though he had brought a great deal of his troubles on himself, that he needed William most. But William couldn’t help. He did try, and, for nearly four years after Coleridge’s return from Malta, did his best to restore him to health, helping with his magazine, creating a working environment for him, organizing the household around him; but it didn’t work. Even today, with our superior knowledge of drug addicition and our increased medical facilities, rehabilitation is not an easy task.
Wordsworth was essentially moral and moralistic, strong and determined in mind and body. Coleridge was sinful and suffering, weak in almost every way. De Quincey considered that Coleridge probably had the greater mind and the more abundant talents, but that he squandered them. Wordsworth had the ‘profounder and more ascetic solemnity’, while Coleridge had ‘prodigal and magnificent eccentricities’.
As poets, no-one can really evaluate what they gave each other. Coleridge’s greatest poetic work was done quickly and magnificently, during that first incredible year when they met, when he produced ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’. After about 1802, he became inhibited as a poet, giving up very quickly, declaring that he was leaving the creative work to Wordsworth. Wordsworth too had enjoyed an inspired burst of activity, and though Lyrical Ballads was originally a joint creation, most of the content was Wordsworth’s. His genius continued to grow for the next ten years, despite long absences from Coleridge’s company and supposed inspiration. Might they have done just as well without each other? The consensus of critical opinion over the last hundred and fifty years is that their early work was a joint explosion. They needed each other.
After reading the relevant letters and the reviews carefully, I think that it could be argued that in fact they harmed each other, just as much as they helped each other. Coleridge very quickly disintegrated as a poet, and Wordsworth never really gave him much critical advice or inspiration.
Coleridge did give Wordsworth much help, seeing in him what others had missed, drawing attention to his greatness, explaining him to his friends and then to a confused public—especially in Biographia Literaria, which Coleridge published in 1817. But perhaps Coleridge overdid it. He embarrassed Wordsworth by his praise, which rebounded some what. Calling him a genius at every opportunity, and saying he was so ahead of everyone else that he was out of sight, naturally caused resentment, creating expectations which couldn’t be met, especially as Coleridge was well aware that in Wordsworth’s greatness there was always the possibility of banality, the possibility that he could be ridiculous instead of revelatory.
Many of those savage critics talked in their reviews about Wordsworth’s ‘injudicious friends and flatterers’. Who could they have had in mind but Coleridge, the social butterfly, who went round the London salons, gave public lectures, wrote in the public prints, and took every opportunity, always for the best of motives, to praise his friend?
Like so many partnerships in history, it ended in a silly squabble, a sad spectacle which did credit to neither side. Coleridge never came back to the Lakes and was never part of the Wordsworth household again.
The year of the so-called reconciliation, 1812, turned out to be a sad one for the Wordsworths in several ways. They’d moved to another house in Grasmere, the Parsonage, in the summer of 1811, and this was the home which Coleridge passed that time, without stopping. They hoped they would be free at last from smoking fires, but their short stay at the Parsonage proved just as uncomfortable as life at Allan Bank.
‘Now I must tell you that we like our new house very much,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘There are only three important objects to it. First, that it fronts the East and has no sitting rooms looking westward therefore we lose the sun very soon; secondly that it is too public; and thirdly that the field in which the house stands is very wet and cannot be drained. It is no playing place for the children and leads them into continual temptation to dirty and wet themselves.’
They got used to the lack of direct sun and planted a few shrubs to hide themselves from the road, though, being right in the centre of Grasmere village, right beside the church, they were always in public view; but it was the damp in the end which got them down. They hadn’t realized till they’d been in residence for some time that when the field flooded, their house became waterlogged. Ever afterwards, they thought the dampness in the Parsonage was one of the reasons for the ill health of their children.
Little Catherine, aged three, had been weak for some time, ever since a convulsion a year earlier after she’d eaten some raw carrots. De Quincey, in his Recollections, unfairly put the blame for this on Sally Green, the orphan girl, then only eleven, who was supposedly looking after little Catherine at the time; but there’s no reason to think Sally had been negligent. However, Catherine was left with a limp and, despite various treatments, never regained good health. William and Mary took her, and Thomas who was two years older but also a sickly child, to the seaside, down the Cumbrian coast, which was a great success, and for a while her health did seem to improve.
But in June 1812, Catherine had another convulsion while both William and Mary were away from home. William was just about to leave London, after his reconciliation walk with Coleridge in Hampstead, and join Mary in Wales, where she was having a short holiday with her brother Tom. While they’d been away, Dorothy and Sarah, who had now returned to the household, were in charge of the five children. Dorothy wrote:
On the Sunday afternoon and the Monday I had been for several hours with Willy and her [Catherine] in the Churchyard and they had run races. I then particularly noticed how little was to be seen of her lameness and several persons who came up to speak to us observed how trifling the lameness was. That very night on which she was seized she ran up to bed in such glee striving to get before Willy, and proud that she was going to sleep in her Mother’s bed, an unusual treat. We returned from our walk at a little after nine and John called me to her about a quarter to ten. He was going to bed, found that she had been sick. She was lying with her eyes fixed—and I knew what was going to happen and in a fright called Sarah. She would have persuaded me that the child was only overpowered with sickness but I had seen her before and knew only too well. We lost no time in sending for Mr Scrambler [the doctor] and the meantime applied the remedies used before. Mr Scrambler gave us no hope.…
She died on Wednesday the 4th and was buried on the 8th. We all three, Sarah, John and I followed to her grave. She lies at the South West corner of the church yard, under a tall and beautiful hawthorn which stands in the wall.
Dorothy immediately wrote to William in London, the letter just catching him as he left, asking him to tell Mary the dreadful news when he reached her in Wales; but she also wrote a little note to Tom, Mary’s brother, warning him that William would be arriving with bad news. Tom unwittingly read the letter in Mary’s presence, and when she saw his face, she realized something must have happened and he was forced to tell her. She was distraught and was still ill when William arrived—hardly able to move or speak, except to say that she feared that another child would soon die.
Dorothy also wrote at once to De Quincey, knowing that Catherine had always been his special favourite. ‘It is a great addition to our affliction that her Father and Mother were not here to witness her last struggles and to see her in the last happy weeks of her short life—she never forgot Quincey. Dear innocent. She now lies upon her Mother’s bed, a perfect image of peace.’
De Quincey was more than distraught. For a while, he became mentally deranged by little Catherine’s death, stretching himself every night for two months on her grave in Grasmere churchyard, where she had run races only just before her death, convinced that he could still see her, running happily around. Coleridge, whom they thought might be equally grief-stricken, took little notice of Catherine’s death, neither coming to Grasmere to console the family (as they half expected), nor writing, which hurt them deeply.
Mary’s awful premonition came true. Just six months later, in December 1812, Thomas died, catching pneumonia after a serious bout of measles. William and Mary were both at home. On this occasion, it was Dorothy who was away. William did the letter-writing this time, as Mary was too ill with grief. ‘Pray come to us as soon as you can,’ he wrote to De Quincey, who was in Liverpool at the time. ‘My sister is not at home. Mrs W bears her loss with striking fortitude, and Miss Hutchinson is as well as can be expected.’
William also wrote to Southey, letting them all know at Greta Hall,
I dare not say in what state I am. I loved the Boy with the utmost love of which my soul is capable and he is taken from me—yet in the agony of my spirit in surrendering such a treasure I feel a thousand times richer than if I had never possessed it. God comfort and save you and all our friends and us all from a repetition of such trials. O Southey feel for me. You will impart this sad news to your wife, Mrs Coleridge and Mrs Lovel and Mrs Wilson. Poor woman. She was good to him. Heaven reward her.
Catherine was not quite four and Thomas six and a half. Their deaths clouded the family for many years, much in the same way as the death of John had done seven years previously. William’s grief-stricken sonnet, ‘Surprised by joy—impatient as the wind’, was written in memory of little Catherine. Coleridge at last wrote in sympathy at this second death, when he heard about Thomas, expressing his pain and saying he would come when he’d finished work on a play; but he never did.
The final days at Grasmere ended, therefore, in great sorrow. They were desperate to get out of the Parsonage, the scene of each death, and shake off all the bad memories which Grasmere now had for them, both at Allan Bank (with the Coleridge troubles) and the Parsonage. The next year, 1813, they finally moved out of Grasmere and into a new house and a new life: a change of scene which coincided with a change in their fortunes.
‘This was suggested by my daughter Catherine long after her death,’ so Wordsworth said. Catherine died in June 1812, aged three years and nine months.
SURPRISED by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind –
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.