THE finest folks of all were of course the Lowthers, lords of all they surveyed. William developed an almost lemming-like longing to serve them, going out of his way to cultivate their friendship, as if a recessive gene from his father and grandfather, long dormant and despised, was eating into his soul. Without being asked, and without any formal agreement, he started to do what his father had done before him. In effect, he became their spy. This might seem rather a melodramatic description, but, as he was never their employee, and he should not officially have been doing what he did for them, it is fair to call him one of their under-cover agents. Strangely enough, the present Earl of Lonsdale maintains that both Wordsworth and his father were employed by the Lowthers. It is presumably a family belief, handed down through the generations, though in Wordsworth’s case it certainly was not true. If he had been employed as some sort of official agent, then his behaviour would have been easier to explain.
Over a period of twenty years, Wordsworth came round to honestly and genuinely believing that his patriotic duty was to support the Tories, the Established Church and the Landed Gentry. The Lowthers personified the values he approved of. At the same time, he considered himself a lover of liberty and national independence, and when friends and strangers wrote to him, accusing him of being a turncoat, for example in his attitude to France, then he replied by saying that he had always been consistent in his hatred of tyranny. He had stayed the same—it was the tyrants who had changed their coats. He had approved of the early days of the French Revolution, when the tyranny of the ancien régime had been overthrown, but when he saw at first hand the Reign of Terror, when the mob themselves became tyrants, followed by a third form of tyranny, Napoleon’s, then naturally he opposed them all. He had been against English intervention in the early days, but he stoutly supported England in her war against Napoleon. He’d always loved liberty and would oppose tyranny, whatever its form.
On some minor matters, he did have the grace to admit that he’d changed his mind slightly. He had believed that the press must be free, as a vital element in democracy, but his early romantic notions, believing it should be completely free, had gone. By the 1820s he favoured restraints: the press should be independent, but subversive elements had to be checked. One couldn’t allow the fabric of society to be endangered by these new radical elements. He knew only too well where it could all lead. At the root of Wordsworth’s new political belief was fear. He did not like many things that were happening in the world at large and he feared the consequences if they were allowed to get worse. The only hope, as he saw it, was a return to the status quo. For the good of everyone, for the individual and for the community, society should not be torn apart.
It has to be remembered that Wordsworth, as he approached fifty, had lived through some stirring times—perhaps the most dramatic period in British history since the Civil War. Previous upheavals had often been localized, limited to one class or one region, but the changes in the first half of the nineteenth century affected every single person. It is one of the many fascinations of Wordsworth’s life, to see how, in his thoughts and in his writings, he responds to all the changes taking place. From the French Revolution to railways, Wordsworth was a front-line observer, an eye-witness with some very strong opinions.
Three revolutions were happening at once, all of them related—industrial, political and social. Wordsworth, in his letters to the Earl of Lonsdale and to his other friends, diagnosed the changes with great accuracy. He could see quite clearly the ravages created in family life by the Industrial Revolution and the new factories: the all-night shifts, the abuses of child and female labour, the dangers to health and morals, and the breakdown in rural life as people fled from the country to the towns.
He saw the new political agitators, pressing for reforms and freedoms, encouraging insurrection in the towns and amongst the agricultural labourers. In his letters he constantly drew comparisons with the agitators he had seen at work in France. Even reading expressions of relatively harmless liberal opinions in the local paper, the Kendal Chronicle, led him to the gloomiest of thoughts. ‘Never was the press more atrociously abused than in that journal at present,’ he wrote to Lord Lowther in 1818. ‘Every sentence almost in it reminds me of what I used to read in France in the year 1792 when the Revolution was advancing towards its zenith.’
He also saw the breakdown in class divisions—which, again, he bitterly regretted. He looked back to his boyhood days, that wonderful halcyon period in Hawkshead at the end of the eighteenth century, when men served their masters happily, when each had his own job and his own respect, when landowners and tenants pulled together, when enlightened property-owners helped the poor and the poor were grateful and not resentful. One recurring theme in his letters is how, in the good old days, the gentry mixed freely with tradesmen, personally using their shops, treating them, if not as equals, then as people with their proper place in society. Here he was obviously thinking of his Penrith days, which had not been at all happy for him at the time. Now, in middle age, he saw all the good points. His own shopkeeping relations had indeed been socially mobile—marrying into the gentry, securing social and educational advancement for their children, all without having to storm the battlements or overthrow the established order. Wordsworth saw what was happening, as he went round, carrying out his duties as Distributor of Stamps—his province soon grew to include parts of north Lancashire and the west Cumbrian industrial coast—and he heard the radicals fomenting disruption. His diagnoses were correct, and well in advance of events, even if they were slightly exaggerated (he had the grace to admit in one letter that he was possibly an alarmist), but his remedy was the wrong one. He tended to favour political repression, even though he also wanted more education and better conditions for the working classes. In his view, all these reforms could be brought about under the auspices of the old order. He had seen the extremes at first hand and didn’t want them to happen in England. It was a very English viewpoint, and still is to this day: moderation in all things. Let the Tory Party, the Church of England and the landed squires continue to run the country in their decent, moderate way, and in the long run everyone will be better off. At all costs, the ‘mob’ must not be allowed to dictate events.
Together with the ‘mob’, a vague term at the best of times, though he often used it, he feared the new grasping manufacturers. He despised their methods and their values, their lack of culture and their vulgarity. Though there was no lack of contemporary reports, Wordsworth’s own prejudice was mostly based on ignorance, since, to judge from his letters, it would appear that he personally never met such people. He compared what he had picked up about them to the Lakeland statesmen, whom he did know, and naturally preferred.
He seemed unaware of the growing, if still small, number of enlightened manufacturers, especially Quakers, who were doing more for their work-force, in the way of social benefits and improved conditions, than the Tories, such as himself, who were trying to turn the clock back. Robert Owen, the great Scottish social reformer, tried to interest both Southey and Wordsworth in his schemes, and Southey went to look at his model factory in New Lanark. The Wordsworth household thought him a good man, but a ‘little cranky’.
It was the rise to power of the manufacturers generally which Wordsworth dreaded, especially if the Reform Bill should ever be passed, giving them political importance and making them a direct threat to the traditional landowners. Manufacturers, he believed, were motivated by self-interest. Owning property, on the other hand, made you care.
Wordsworth admitted that in his early days he hadn’t quite appreciated the worth of the property classes. It was something the London radicals and wits and new poets still didn’t understand; he himself now knew from his own experience that the landowners, on the whole, were a power for good. They kept the country together. Cynics might say, and did say, that Wordsworth was motivated by self-interest, since he was now one of the property-owners himself, on the fringes of the landed classes, living in his smart house and with smart neighbours. He had a public post, which had been obtained for him by the local lord; so naturally he was in favour of the status quo. When someone has climbed to the top of the ladder—or at least, to the lower rungs—he doesn’t want the rules changed, the ladder taken down, and everyone having to start again—not when it has taken him so long to get there. This would be one nasty interpretation of Wordsworth’s new political beliefs. His own life style would belie it: he wasn’t trying to amass luxuries and wealth for himself or his family, though he was thankful for his new financial security.
Wordsworth apologists—most of whom are lovers of his poetry who suspect any criticism of his life and politics as being an attack on his art—always point to the worthy sentiments expressed in his poetry, and to his concern for the working man, and they dismiss as unimportant his agitation for the reactionary Tories and his underground political letters. Another defence is to say that he was never really a violent radical. His French Revolution phase was basically romance, and in any case, he supported the Girondists (the moderate radicals), not the more extreme Jacobins. In his mind, he probably hoped that the Revolution would make France into a nice, fairly liberal place like England. When it all went wrong, he retreated to his love for good old England, which had always been there. It is an attractive argument.
My view is that he was a definite radical but that, over a twenty-year span, a turnabout took place, a volte-face, in his political and social beliefs, and his letters prove it. This is not necessarily reprehensible. It is a change which is there to be studied, not denied.
The big event which brought it all out into the open, revealing William’s new loyalties, was the general election of 1818. Westmorland had two MPs, Lord Lowther and Colonel Henry Lowther, both the sons of the Earl of Lonsdale. For forty-four years, the Lowthers had held their two seats unopposed; they’d controlled the two constituencies, just as they’d controlled another seven or so seats in the north-west, filling them with their own placemen (either members of their own family or trusted supporters).
William, while in London in December 1817, heard rumours that Westmorland was going to be opposed and wrote a letter to Lord Lonsdale, thanking him for a present (‘Your Lordship’s boots were of infinite service to me, as owing to the Mail being full I was obliged to venture on the outside’), tipping him off about the rumours and promising to investigate and report further. The opponent turned out to be Henry Brougham, a member of a distinguished landed family who had an estate near Penrith. He had been born and educated in Edinburgh and was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review. That should have been a warning to William, though they had met some eight years or so earlier and had been quite friendly. Brougham was later to become one of the leading Whig politicians of his day, a cabinet minister, Lord Chancellor and eventually a baron. (His name went into Victorian household usage with his invention of the Brougham coach.) However, in 1818, aged forty, Brougham was still something of a wild radical—not trusted by the mainstream Whig politicians, but admired for his oratory and his skill in handling mobs.
William was determined that Brougham, whom he called a dangerous demagogue, shouldn’t succeed in Westmorland, and he started organizing support for the Lowthers. He sent them detailed reports from every place he visited, listing the personal politics and beliefs of the leading citizens, marking down the religious Dissenters (who in the main were anti-Tory) or reformers, and naming those who could be trusted to do the right thing and those who could not. He named all the leading lawyers in Kendal, for example, telling Lord Lonsdale which ones should be retained (bribed, in other words) to support the Tories. He reported on people’s relations and friends, and on how much property they owned. Years before, William had himself been spied upon by a government agent, when it was thought he was a radical. Now, he was informing on people behind their backs, and basing much of his testimony on local hearsay.
Just before the election started, William had been privately negotiating, with Lord Lonsdale’s help, to take over the stamp distribution for north Cumberland, a much more lucrative domain than the other areas for which he was responsible. He had arranged with the present incumbent to pay him off with an annuity of £350—which shows just how valuable a job it was—but he dropped negotiations during the election. It would have looked very bad if, at such a time, he had been procured another government job. Also, he was not supposed to engage in any electioneering or in any other political activity, being a government servant.
Most people in local politics knew he was canvassing for the Tories, who had now been in power for over three decades, and were to remain in power for a further twelve years. Brougham, who seems to have been amused rather than terrified by William’s intriguing, often made veiled criticisms of his poetry in his public speeches, knowing William was skulking at the edge of the crowd. People warned William to keep out of all political activity, and at one stage, so William reported in a letter to Lord Lonsdale, he had been told he could be fined £100 ‘for having intermeddled’; but he still continued, sending back his confidential dossiers.
One of the murkier areas of William’s electioneering concerned the buying of land with Lowther money, then dividing it up into lots and letting Tory supporters buy it on reasonable terms, on condition that they voted the right way, now that they’d been made freeholders. Several of William’s relations did well out of these sales of land. Another area in which political pressure could be brought to bear was the law of enfranchisement. Technically, you had to own property to have a vote, but there was a rule that a substantial tenant, having farmed someone else’s land for a long time, could be enfranchised, if the landlord agreed. Naturally, a Tory landowner was not going to enfrancise his radical tenants.
William was also instrumental in writing anonymous letters and articles for the Kendal Chronicle, which, when the election began, proclaimed that it was politically independent, but soon moved to support the Broughamites. William then printed two pamphlets, presumably using Lowther money, in which he addressed the Freeholders of Westmorland. One pamphlet was written in high, flowing phrases for the gentry; the other, for the less educated merchant class. At the same time, William helped the Lowthers to try and buy up shares in the Kendal Chronicle, determined by any means to make the paper toe the right line; but this failed, and the Lowthers were then forced to start their own paper, the Westmorland Gazette. William wrote to his London newspaper friends, such as Stuart, asking if they knew any likely editors.
There was great excitement when at length the two Lowther candicates made their official entry into Kendal; but it ended in violence, with riots in the street, stones being thrown and many people getting hurt. The Lowthers blamed it on the Broughamites, alleging that they had hired hooligans to disrupt the proceedings. The Broughamites denied this accusation, saying the riot showed how strong the anti-Lowther feeling was.
The Broughamites wore blue and the Lowthers yellow—the traditional Lowther family colour and one which Tories in Cumbria still sport at election time, even though, in the rest of the country, Tories are always true blue. Dorothy got caught up in all the election fever—unlike Mary and Sarah, who stayed at home, thinking William should direct his energies into more useful channels. She went out canvassing in Kendal with William, who was taking care to avoid being seen near Lord Lonsdale or his sons, and using different hotels to avoid public contact. ‘The misguided mob, including almost all the lower classes who have no votes, cry aloud for Brougham,’ Dorothy wrote. ‘No lady would venture to appear in a yellow ribband in Kendal streets, though you cannot walk thirty yards without meeting a dirty lad or lass with a blue one and the ladies of that party also have no fear of displaying their colour.’
There were some real ladies, and gentlemen, on the Brougham side, including some other titled landowners and even some of the Wordsworths’ own relations, such as their cousin William Crackenthorpe. They met him on one occasion and discussed their political differences amicably. Even sadder for William, one of their dearest friends, one whom they greatly admired, Thomas Clarkson, the anti-slavery campaigner, was a supporter of Brougham.
William took it all very seriously, but he could still on occasions see the lighter side. ‘My youngest Son is a complete Yellow,’ he wrote to Lord Lowther in March 1818, ‘having got the jaundice, poor lad, so that he has no occasion for Ribbons, though he wears them. The Daffodils are anxiously looked for that the young ladies in Rydal may adorn their bonnets with them.’
He also had to admit that Brougham was a good speaker, even passing on one of his jokes to Lord Lowther. He’d heard Brougham speak in Grasmere, where he’d fallen upon the local rector and the local butcher, mocking them in public, knowing they were both strong Lowther supporters. ‘He concluded his lampoon,’ William reported, ‘with this elegant witticism—that the Spirit and the Flesh were both against him.…’ It says much for Brougham’s oratory that he could appeal to the rabble, make jokes about the tradesmen and also include clever insults to amuse the educated.
The highlight of the election was Brougham’s own triumphal entry into Kendal. William and Dorothy had got themselves a good vantage point, in the window of a house overlooking the place chosen for him to give his speech, and even Dorothy had to admit it was a stirring display, despite a snow-storm which greeted the great arrival:
Music, banners, horsemen, all joining in one huzza, fearless of the storm … one condensed line in motion wedging in the horsemen and Carriages … the spectacle was grand. If the cause had been better, my feelings as a Spectator would have been really sublime. Of course when he appeared at the window, he was hailed by a tremendous shout—or when anything fell from his lips that particularly took their fancies, the cry of applause was repeated with more or less vehemence. I could have fancied him one of the French Demagogues of the Tribunal of Terror at certain times, when he gathered a particular fierceness into his face. He is very like a Frenchman.
Dorothy took detailed notes of Brougham’s speech, like a good private secretary, and William sent a copy of her notes to Lord Lonsdale, like a good informer, including even the personal attacks on the Lowther family. Brougham made great play with Lowther Castle, pointing out sarcastically that it had formerly been Lowther Hall, till they’d recently spent a fortune rebuilding it on a vast scale, turning it into a Gothic masterpiece. ‘They have great riches,’ declaimed Brougham. ‘How did they get their riches? It comes out of your pockets!’ Loud cheers all round.
Brougham attacked William personally (though not by name) knowing he must be watching somewhere, calling him ‘the most active of the secret agents, a man with a sinecure in the country, with nothing else or very little to live upon’. He then warmed to his theme, referring to William firstly as an anonymous writer, and then, more specifically, as a poet. This particular poet, he said, worked hard at being a secret agent, though ‘it was much harder work to read his writings’. All Brougham’s immediate entourage laughed exceedingly heartily at this, though presumably most of the rabble didn’t understand the joke.
As one might expect, the Lowthers, having controlled Westmorland for so long, won the day, and Lonsdale’s two sons got over 1,000 votes each and took both seats; but Brougham did surprisingly well, obtaining 889 votes. William and the Lowthers didn’t cease their activities once the election was over, knowing they had to keep vigilant from then on and fight future elections in the same yellow spirit, which they did.
The new paper, the Westmorland Gazette, first appeared in the early summer of 1818, just as the election was reaching its climax, so it didn’t play such a vital part in the campaign, but it remained a Lowther platform for many years. William was successful in his search for a suitable person to be its editor, finding a friend to take it over after it had been going for just a few weeks. It was young Thomas De Quincey.
De Quincey’s misdemeanours were forgotten—or, at least, partly forgotten—when William recommended him for the job: ‘The editorship of the new Kendal paper has passed into the hands of a most able man, one of my particular Friends, but whether he is fit (I mean on the score of punctuality) for such a service, remains to be seen.’ William still blamed De Quincey for the delays in getting his Cintra pamphlet through the press nine years previously, but De Quincey assured him that his punctuality had ‘altered since I last had the happiness to associate with you’. It was a generous gesture on William’s part, to help someone who had now fallen on rather hard times—stuck with a wife and young child, deserted by many of his old friends and with no regular income—but, at the same time, William felt he could use De Quincey to his own advantage, believing that he could be trusted politically, even if his personal habits might not be altogether desirable.
Judging by the look of the early issues, De Quincey tried very hard, filling the pages with juicy court cases to raise the circulation and writing many of his own leaders, attacking the enemies of the Tories in good rabble-rousing fashion. At times, he rather overdid the invective, so that Lord Lonsdale himself began to be slightly worried. ‘I think our own Kendal paper is now getting too libellous. Last week’s specimen is certainly a blackguard production.’
De Quincey’s initial burst of enthusiasm and activity didn’t last long and very soon he was writing the whole paper from home in Dove Cottage, over in Grasmere, hardly ever appearing at the office in Kendal. He was reprimanded by the proprietors in June 1819 for missing the London news, for not contacting the printer and for residing at such a great distance from the office, failings which would be hard to excuse in even the most gifted writer. He announced in the columns of the paper in July that he had received a letter from one of the proprietors which he proposed to ‘notice fully next week’. Alas, they got him first, extracted his resignation before he could reply publicly. He was eased out, after fourteen months in the job, leaving the paper established as a Tory rag, but with a loss of £42 in its first year of trading. It is a pity he never got his reply published. It would have been interesting to see if he had turned against the Fine Folks who had hired him. As it was, the fine folks went on to flourish and find fresh fortune.
The first volume of new poetry which William published after his move to Rydal Mount was dedicated to the Earl of Lonsdale: ‘Illustrious peer, a token of high respect and gratitude sincere.’ This was The Excursion which came out in 1814, followed the next year by a new edition of William’s Collected Poems and by The White Doe of Rylstone, the poem he had written some years before but had kept back. He had published no poetry for seven years, after that mauling he’d had over his 1807 Poems, but his friends were full of hope this time.
The Excursion was treated as a major literary event, which indeed it was. It was William’s first long poem (some four hundred and twenty pages) to be published, and had taken him almost twenty years to complete. It was meant, as he explained in a rather confusing preface, to come after his long proposed ‘The Recluse’—a work which he never completed, apart from a section called ‘Home at Grasmere’. Coleridge had always wanted William to produce a major poem, instead of so many short pieces. Crabb Robinson was full of excitement and so was Southey. The critics were equally excited and they cleared the pages in readiness. The big names among them were commissioned and they were given an enormous amount of space for their reviews, between two and three thousand words each. Imagine any poem today being given such attention.
Beforehand, William himself was rather cynically jocular about the critics’ possible reaction. ‘I am about to print (do not start!) eight thousand lines, which is but a small portion of what I shall oppress the world with, if strength and life do not fail me. I shall be content if the Publication pays its expenses, for Mr Scott and your friend Lord B. flourishing at the rate they do, how can an honest Poet hope to thrive?’ These remarks were made in a private letter to a London literary friend, Samuel Rogers. If only William could occasionally have been as light and self-deprecating in his public pronouncements. Once again, his new preface—like the one to his collected poems—put many people off, partly by its arrogance and self-importance, and partly by the sheer difficulty in understanding it.
The comment about Scott and Lord Byron wasn’t meant entirely as a joke. William came to hate Byron, as a poet and as a person, considering him both evil and immoral. Scott he greatly liked as a person, and they were always good friends, but he never considered him a real poet—by which of course he meant a poet like Wordsworth. Scott simply told stirring tales, with lots of colour and emotion, but had no philosophy of poetry. He was the kindest and most genuinely loved of all the literary giants of the time—a time noted for its venomous literary back-biting—and he was quite without self-importance or arrogance. He agreed with Wordsworth: he didn’t think his own poetry was very good and always rated Wordsworth and Southey higher than himself.
William was in a way slightly envious of Scott’s and Byron’s huge commercial success. Even with his friend Scott, he could be a little spiteful behind his back, though William’s family were at least aware of his lingering jealousy. In another letter to Samuel Rogers, William adds a nice PS about Scott’s poetry:
What you say of W. Scott reminds me of an Epigram something like the following —
Tom writes his Verses with huge speed,
Faster than Printer’s boy can set ’em,
Faster than we can read,
And only not so fast as we forget ’em.
Mrs W, poor Woman! who sits by me, says, with a kind of sorrowful smile—this is spite, for you know that Mr Scott’s verses are the delight of the Times and that thousands can repeat scores of pages.
Scott himself hoped William would do well with his new volumes of poetry—he’d personally provided some of the background material for The White Doe and had discussed the work in many letters to William.
The great critical brains of the time thought they knew best. Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review, made his opinion of The Excursion clear in the very first sentence of his extensive review: ‘This will never do.’ It doesn’t exactly make you want to read on. Jeffrey did admit there were some good single lines, ‘that sparkle like gems in a desert and startle us with an intimation of the great poetic powers that lie buried in the rubbish that has been heaped around them’.
Hazlitt wrote a long review for The Examiner, which wasn’t as savage but was also a condemnation; he regretted that the skill with which William had chosen his material wasn’t equal to his skill in writing about it. He likened The Excursion to a stupendous structure, which had been left half-finished and suffered to moulder into decay. In passing, Hazlitt, who had long since ceased to be a friend of William or of his politics, had a swipe at the inhabitants of the ‘boasted mountain districts’ William persisted in writing about, calling them stupid, selfish and insensitive. He was presumably thinking of those natives who had hounded him out for his misdemeanours.
Charles Lamb, in private letters, had been flattering about The Excursion, and Wordsworth prevailed on him to write a review, which he did at last; but it was hacked about and cut and didn’t help the sales. Coleridge kept quiet for months, making no comments to his friends, and when he eventually told Wordsworth what he thought, it was obvious he was disappointed. He knew the poem was nothing like as good as the unpublished work, The Prelude. On the whole, this view is still held today, though there are sections of The Excursion which are still studied and admired by scholars, such as that about the ruined cottage. It was the longest poem Wordsworth ever wrote—The Prelude, when it was finally published, was slightly shorter—and is very rambling and didactic. The poet-hero wanders into the Lake District, where he meets several characters, such as a Parson and a Pedlar, who all sit and tell long tales, with Wordsworth using them as mouthpieces to elaborate his views on life, covering everything from the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution to the Church of England and blindness.
The Collected Poems of 1815 were interesting in that Wordsworth rearranged his Lyrical Ballads, plus all the other poems included in the volume, into different sections, according to their mood, such as ‘Poems of Childhood’ and ‘Poems of the Imagination’. There were some new poems, such as ‘Yarrow Visited’, and three poems written by Dorothy (though he said they were by a ‘female friend’). It was the Preface, however, that got most attention; it either annoyed or stimulated people, since, in effect, Wordsworth tried in it to defend himself and his poetry from previous attacks. He wrote it in a very magisterial style, expounding at great length on his own definitions of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’.
The White Doe of Rylstone, which William personally always thought was one of his finest poems, didn’t get as much attention as The Excursion, but was treated in a similar manner. The Edinburgh Review began in its usual uncompromising style: ‘This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume.…’ The reviewer went on to consider whether it was all a joke—a satire by someone pretending to write in the style of Mr Wordsworth—but no, they decided it must be genuine: ‘Nothing in the nature of a joke could be so insupportably dull.’ The Monthly Review said it was now tired of pointing out Mr Wordsworth’s errors, and the Eclectic Review dismissed the poem as ‘arrogant egotism’.
One of the many obstacles to the success of the new publications, apart from those damning reviews, was their price. The Excursion cost two guineas, an enormous sum for those days. (It was only in the early 1970s that virtually all book prices jumped above the £2 level.) William tried his hardest to promote sales, writing letters to his well-off friends, hoping they would buy; when he did give a free copy to friends, such as Charles Lloyd, it was on the understanding that it should not be loaned to anyone. He personally refused a copy to a lady whom he knew could well afford it: ‘a widow with £1,500 per annum … a blue stocking Dame who considered two guineas an outrageous price’.
Signing sessions were unknown in those days, as were publicity appearances, but William, in his modest way, mounted a public relations campaign on his own behalf. One day, he decided to take The Excursion to a rich old lady to whom he read out choice passages, in the hope that she would be tempted, or persuaded, into buying her own copy. Dorothy has a description of their foray in a letter to Sarah:
William and Mary and little Willy paid a visit to old Mrs Knott yesterday with the Exn. in hand, William intending to read the old Lady the history of the Grasmere Knight. She could not hear his loud voice, but understood the story very well when her Niece read it. Today they have returned the Book and poor Miss K. has written a complimentary but alas! unintelligible note. She must have been in a strange ruffled state of mind. She concludes however by saying in plain words that she had written to Kendal to order the Book. I tell William that the family made a trading voyage of it. Certainly the Book would never have been bought by Miss K. if Willy and his Father and Mother had stayed quietly at home.
Despite such personal efforts, the sales were poor. After a year, only three hundred copies of the first edition of five hundred had been sold. The publishers, Longmans, doubtless had to price it highly, because of its great length and because they knew, or feared, it wouldn’t be a best-seller. William kept on working hard at promoting sales, hoping desperately for a second and cheaper edition, which would bring the poem to the attention of the less well off. He comforted himself by telling everyone about the famous people who had told him they had personally loved the book, and by dismissing the reviewers as idiots:
Jeff. has already printed off a Review beginning with these elegant and decisive words ‘This will not do’, the sage critic then proceeding to show cause why. This precious piece is what the Coxcomb’s Idolators call a crushing review. I much doubt whether he has read three pages of the poem.… The Bishop of London is in raptures, the Duke of Devonshire made it his companion in a late jaunt to Ireland, a Lady of Liverpool, a Quaker, breaks through all forms of ceremony to express her gratitude by letter.
William affected to be above the attacks and, with his eye steadily aimed at posterity, to be immune from the critics’ puny arrows, maintaining he never stooped to reading their pathetic reviews—it was always other people who told him about them, or brought them to his attention: ‘I am astonished that you can find no better use for your money than spending it on those silly Reviews,’ he wrote to Sarah, finishing with an affectionate farewell, to show he was in good humour. ‘I send you love and a kiss, two or three if you like, that prove the better for being liberal.’
But the family worried on his behalf, especially as they needed the money. ‘I have no anxiety about the fate of either The Excursion or The White Doe,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘beyond the sale of the first edition—and that I do earnestly wish for. There are few persons who can afford to buy a two guinea book, merely for admiration of the Book. The edition has no chance of being sold except to the wealthy; and they buy books for fashion’s sake than anything else and alas we are not yet in the fashion.’ What Dorothy hoped for was that ‘somebody would but puff the Book amongst the fashionable and wealthy’—which is a nice early use of a hackneyed phrase. She wanted a puff of wind to blow it to success.
William was greatly saddened by the attacks, despite his lofty dismissals and his bitter jokes at his own expense. ‘Why don’t you hire somebody to abuse you?’ he wrote to a literary friend in 1817. ‘For myself, I begin to fear that I should soon be forgotten if it were not for my enemies.’
At other times, he seriously thought of retiring, or said he was seriously thinking of it: ‘As to publishing I shall give it up, as nobody will buy what I send forth; nor can I expect it seeing what stuff the public appetite is set upon.’
His old friends were equally hurt by the attacks on him, especially the Edinburgh Review’s, which was the talk of all the literary circles of the day. ‘Jeffrey, I hear, has written what his admirers call a crushing review of The Excursion,’ Southey wrote to Walter Scott. ‘He might as well seat himself upon Skiddaw and fancy that he could crush the mountain. I heartily wish Wordsworth may one day meet with him and lay him alongside, yard arm and yard arm in argument.’
Southey, who suffered by being associated with William and was attacked just as lustily by the Edinburgh Review, was the friend who had previously observed to William that though Jeffrey could not spoil their laurels, he might mildew their corn. The bad reviews undoubtedly did have an effect on William’s sales. The books would probably not have been great popular sellers, but over twenty years his income would have been greatly improved, if it had not been for the Edinburgh Review.
They are altogether incompetent judges [wrote William]. These people in the senseless hurry of their idle lives do not read books, they merely snatch a glance at them, that they may talk about them. Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be seen. For those who dip into books in order to give an opinion—for this multitude of unhappy and misguided and misguiding beings, an entire regeneration must be produced, and if this be possible it must be a work of time.
William could be philosophical because, at heart, he was convinced of his own genius. ‘All men of first rate genius have been as distinguished for dignity, beauty and propriety of moral conduct,’ he wrote on one occasion—an arguable generalization, which excludes Byron but includes Wordsworth. At the time, he was actually thinking of Burns, whom he thought had been cruelly used after his death, when all his sexual behaviour was brought into the open; in a published letter about Burns he maintained the charges were mainly untrue and certainly unfair.
But the Wordsworth family would have liked some financial rewards there and then. Living with a genius didn’t pay the rent. ‘We shall never grow rich,’ wrote Dorothy after all the reviews had come out.
For I now perceive clearly that till my dear Brother is laid in his grave his writings will not produce any profit. This I now care no more about and shall never more trouble my head concerning the sale of them. I once thought The White Doe might have helped off the other, but I now perceive it can hardly help itself. It is a pity it was published in so expensive a form (one guinea for a slim volume) because some are thereby deprived of the pleasure of reading it; but however cheap his poems might be, I am sure it will be very long before they have an extensive sale—nay it will not be while he is alive to know it. His writings will live—will comfort the afflicted and animate the happy to purer happiness when we and our cares are all forgotten.
THE WHITE DOE
The first six lines of this introduction to The White Doe of Rylstone, published in 1815, were originally used in his unperformed play, The Borderers.
ACTION is transitory—a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle—this way or that –
’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infirmity.
Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem
And irremoveable) gracious openings lie,
By which the soul—with patient steps of thought
Now toiling, wafted now on wings of prayer
May pass in hope, and, though from mortal bonds
Yet undelivered, rise with sure ascent
Even to the fountain-head of peace divine.