AFTER a shaky start, the other literary establishment across at Greta Hall in Keswick was flourishing greatly, and Robert Southey, sole male head of the Southey-Coleridge clan, achieved popularity and eminence before Wordsworth when he’d become Poet Laureate in 1813. They hadn’t been close friends in the early days; perhaps they had even been unspoken rivals, though that bad review by Southey of Lyrical Ballads had been inspired in part by spite against his brother-in-law Coleridge, as they’d recently fallen out over pantisocracy.
Over the years, Wordsworth and Southey had grown much closer, in their lives and in their characters, each becoming more Tory and reactionary, their republican days long behind them. As people, they grew to become genuine friends. They comforted each other in family grief; but, most of all, they were brought together by their respective offspring. The Coleridge children were constantly with the Wordsworths, for weeks on end, the Southey children usually joined them, and they all paid each other return visits. The daughters of the three poets turned out to be each other’s best friends.
Southey hadn’t really wanted to come to the Lakes. He’d put off Coleridge’s entreaties for a couple of years, hoping something else would turn up—going to Dublin for a spell as a minor civil servant, then ending up back at home in Bristol, though still looking for some sort of paid job to keep him going. It was the death of his first child, Margaret, in 1803 that suddenly made him take up Coleridge’s offer: he couldn’t face the Bristol house any more and he thought his wife and Mrs Coleridge would provide sisterly comfort for each other. Even so, for the first few years in Keswick he was still hoping for a nice overseas appointment, particularly one in Portugal, his first love.
It turned out to be a watershed in his life—arriving in the Lakes after eight years of wandering, with different jobs and different homes. He suddenly revealed the most enormous willpower and single-minded concentration, qualities hidden until that moment, and for the next forty years lived in the Lakes, devoting himself to his pen and to being a parent. You often find hints in his letters that he might have been subjugating some deep passion, some yearning to wander off again; but the clues are slight and he did become the model Victorian patriarch.
His reputation as a poet was based on five epic poems, all now unread, starting with Joan of Arc back in 1796, which Charles Lamb said marked him as the greatest living poet. His most admired epic was The Curse of Kehama (1810), loved by all the new young poets, such as Keats, Shelley and Byron.
Unlike Wordsworth, who saw himself only as a poet, pure and simple, Southey had two other literary occupations which increasingly took over his working life. He’d been a hack reviewer since his early days, along with Coleridge, accepting every little book review commission that came his way; but now he grew into a journalist of great importance, writing long essays and articles on the subjects of the day. In 1809 he began writing regularly for the Quarterly Review; at the height of his fame he was being paid £100 an article, an enormous sum for those days. (Most of today’s literary magazines still don’t pay as highly.) The Edinburgh Review tried to tempt him away—which he knew would be good for his own books, as the magazine’s reviewers would be bound to be kinder to him—but naturally, being a man of honour, he couldn’t go over to the enemy and turned the offer down. In 1817 he was offered the equally large sum of £2,000 a year to write for The Times. Crabb Robinson, friend to all the Lake Poets, was the intermediary, and it seems possible that they might even have been going to offer him the editorship, as the owner of The Times, John Walter, had just sacked his editor, and Southey was much respected by the ruling Tory government. But Southey turned them down too, not wishing to leave the Lakes. By this time, his earnings from his own writings, which he worked at almost round the clock, were probably about £2,000 anyway. Wordsworth, by comparison, was at this time lucky to average £20 a year from his poetry.
Southey’s other source of income was non-fiction. His passion for Portugal turned into a three-volume history of Brazil, the first one of that country; but he never got his history of Portugal itself finished. He wrote other historical books, including one on the Peninsular War, but his speciality was biography; his Life of Nelson did much to confirm Nelson as a public hero.
In his day, it was Southey’s prose style that was chiefly admired. Even Wordsworth, who never publicly praised Southey’s poetry, even when he became an intimate friend, enormously enjoyed Southey’s prose, as everyone did. Byron called it perfect and Hazlitt said it could ‘scarcely be too much praised’. It is forgotten now that while Wordsworth was setting out to free English poetry from gaudiness and inane phraseology, English prose was also suffering from the convoluted but empty elegance of the eighteenth-century manner.
Southey worked like a demon at each of his writing activities, turning himself into a positive industry. Over at Rydal, when William was in one of his fallow periods, preoccupied with politics, travelling or family affairs, they often wished he was as creative as Southey.
William is quite well [wrote Dorothy to Mrs Clarkson in 1821], though he has not looked at The Recluse or the poem of his own life, and this disturbs us. After fifty years of age, there is no time to spare, and unfinished works should not, if it be possible, be left behind. This he feels, but the will never governs his labours. How different from Southey, who can go as regularly as clockwork, from history to poetry, from poetry to criticism, and so on to biography, or anything else. If their minds could each spare a little to the other, how much better for both!
Southey had to work so hard because he had so many people to support by his writings alone. There were, firstly, the three Coleridge children he inherited: Hartley, Derwent and Sara; he then went on to produce eight children of his own, though two died in infancy. After a run of six girls, he had a longed-for son, Herbert, who turned out to be another child prodigy in the house, almost as clever as Hartley, knowing Greek, French, German and Latin by the time he was nine. He died, aged ten, in 1815, a shock which greatly upset Southey and his wife, and all in the Wordsworth household, who offered to do anything they could to help. Sarah Hutchinson was the universal aunt for both households. In turn, she ministered to the needs of the three poets. After Coleridge had left, she went on to act for long spells as a secretary or just a living-in friend for the Southeys, when she wasn’t doing the same for the Wordsworths. At Rydal Mount, as at Greta Hall, whenever there was a domestic upset, the cry was the same: ‘Send for Sarah.’
The Southeys had a final child—a son, Cuthbert—in 1819, when Mrs Southey was forty-seven, which brought the total number of children in the house back to eight. Then there were the adults. A third Fricker sister, Mrs Lovell (widow of Robert Lovell, the young writer who was also in the pantisocracy scheme), came to the Lakes with the Southeys, though Coleridge had advised them to pension her off. She not only stayed, but outlived them all. That meant twelve permanent mouths to feed, plus many regular and impecunious visitors. There were two more Fricker sisters, maiden aunts called Martha and Eliza, who were regular guests. Southey’s joke was that Greta Hall was an ant-hill—not just because of his ferocious activity, but because every lady was somebody’s aunt.
Southey, in effect, had three wives—just like Wordsworth. His wife, Mrs Coleridge and Mrs Lovell all supported him as best they could and looked to him as master of the house.
A mutual friend, a Miss Barker, who lived in Keswick, said that both Wordsworth and Southey were spoiled by their three wives, ‘but that Wordsworth’s were much preferable to Southey’s’. The Fricker sisters, on the whole, do seem to have been rather dreary, depressing ladies, and nobody, in all the memoirs, has a good word to say for them, compared with Dorothy and the Hutchinson sisters, who are constantly being praised. Both households had friends in common, such as Crabb Robinson, Humphry Davy and Walter Scott, and most people new to the Lakes tried to visit both establishments on their tour, if they wanted to boast, as everyone did, that they’d seen the Lake Poets.
Coleridge has left the worst testimony against his wife Sara; but then he would, blaming her for many of his own failings. ‘If anyone wanted an exact and copious recipe, “How to make a Husband completely miserable” I could furnish her with one,’ wrote Coleridge. ‘Ill tempered Speeches sent after me when I went out of the House, ill tempered speeches on my return, my friends received with freezing looks, the least opposition or contradiction received with screams of passion—all this added to the utter negation of all of which a Husband expects from a wife.’ Dorothy had been equally against Sara in the early days, but they all came to like her more, as she blossomed after Coleridge had left.
Southey joined the chorus which agreed that Wordsworth was a lucky man, adding a rather personal but mysterious comment on his own circumstances. ‘No man was ever more fortunate in wife, sister or sister in law than he has been,’ Southey wrote to a lady friend about Wordsworth. ‘There is no woman out of my own house (except one whom I shall not name to you) with whom I am so intimate as Miss Hutchinson, or whom I love altogether so well.’ What could that possibly mean? He could have meant Sara Coleridge, except she had married and left home; or perhaps her mother. Did he prefer Mrs Coleridge to his own wife? There was always a slight suggestion that he and Coleridge had originally married the wrong sisters.
De Quincey, in his Recollections of the Lake Poets, has left rather a dour picture of Southey, locked away in his library, with his fourteen thousand books, always charming and courteous to meet, but his mind always half on his work, perhaps a nicer man than Wordsworth, but far less inspiring. He was five feet eleven inches tall, an inch taller than Wordsworth, according to De Quincey, as well as being better dressed and more presentable. From his portraits, Southey does appear much the handsomer, finer figure. Byron, at his early meeting with Southey, was impressed both by his poetry and his appearance: ‘The best looking bard I have seen for some time. To have that poet’s head and shoulders, I would almost have written his Sapphics. His appearance is epic and he is the only existing entire man of letters.’
One of the best Southey-Wordsworth gatherings—and they had many picnics, expeditions and tours together—was held in 1815, to celebrate Waterloo. Each was now a confirmed French-hater, having lost all republican zeal. Southey organized a triumphant ascent of Skiddaw, with a great party on top and a massive bonfire. Most of Southey’s own family were there, plus William, Mary and Dorothy from Rydal; several local lords and lordlings; friends and children, and three maids to serve the feast, all of whom were followed up the mountain by ‘Messrs. Rag, Tag and Bobtail’.
At the top, they had roast beef, plum pudding and punch, and sang ‘God Save the King’ round a bonfire made of tar barrels. Blazing balls of tow and turpentine were rolled down the mountain side for extra effects. ‘We formed a huge circle round the intense light,’ wrote one guest later, ‘and behind us was an immeasurable arch of the most intense darkness, for our bonfire fairly put out the moon.’ They didn’t get back to Keswick till after midnight, by which time some of the Messrs Rag, Tag and Bobtail were happily drunk. Mrs Coleridge hadn’t gone with them, but had stayed at home with some of the younger children: ‘I had a very anxious time during the nine hours of their absence for I feared lest the mists should come on and so keep them on the heights all night. Not a cloud came to distress them and not one of the party were any worse for the expedition.’
Southey welcomed all visitors, despite his crowded writing schedule, and answered all letters, giving help to every unknown who wrote. He had a long correspondence with a lady called Caroline Bowles, who sent him some poems which he not only helped to edit but for which he found her a publisher. (It was to Miss Bowles he wrote the letter about the ladies of his household.) Another letter from an unknown was one signed C. Brontë—a name he mistook for a pseudonym, as it looked so odd—enclosing some verse for his comments. In his rather discouraging reply he told her that marriage was a woman’s proper career: ‘The day dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind, and in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else. Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not to be.’ However, he ended on a kinder note. ‘Farewell madam. It is not because I have forgotten that I was once young myself that I write to you in this strain, but because I remember it.… Though I may be an ungracious adviser, you will allow me, therefore, to subscribe myself, with the best wishes for your happiness here and hereafter, your true friend, Robert Southey.’
When this letter turned up at a saleroom about seventy years later, Charlotte Brontë was found to have endorsed the letter with the following words: ‘Southey’s advice to be kept for ever. My twenty-first birthday. Roe Head, April 21, 1837.’
The better established young writers had introductions and were entertained at Greta Hall. One such was Shelley, who in 1811 had run away to Keswick with his child bride, and lived there for six months. He’d hoped to see Wordsworth as well, but didn’t manage it. He was an admirer of both of them, describing Southey’s Kehama as his ‘most favourite poem’. He was received by Southey, taken round the house, and shown all his books, but not allowed to handle them himself. Southey didn’t approve of that. Afterwards, Shelley decided Southey was a reactionary old bore, and they later carried on a violent quarrel in letters, after Shelley had wrongly thought Southey had given him a bad review.
Southey did rather go in for acrimonious correspondence with other writers, often for the sport, and to exercise his journalistic muscles, though the issue was sometimes very serious. Like Wordsworth, who was branded with Southey as a turncoat, lost to politics and poetry, he particularly hated Byron and christened his writing the ‘Satanic School of Poetry’. Byron and he had a typically convoluted literary row, in private and in published articles and verse, with accusations flying around. It ended with Byron challenging Southey to a duel, but his second never delivered the challenge.
Byron scored the most points in this public argument with Southey and Wordsworth—much to the amusement of all the young wits, who enjoyed his satirical verses in Don Juan, where he names the guilty men of his generation (and, incidentally, in passing, makes clear the correct pronunciation of Southey):
Thou shall believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope,
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey,
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy.
In another stanza of Don Juan, which started to appear in the 1820s, Byron did a very clever parody of one of Southey’s own poems, copying the metre exactly:
For pantisocracy he once had cried
Aloud, a scheme less moral than ’t was clever
Then grew a hearty anti-jacobin
Had turned his coat—and would have turned his skin.
By the 1820s, both Lakeland poets were long-confirmed Tories, so you can imagine Southey’s outrage when, in 1817, a republican, Jacobin play he’d written twenty years earlier, which had never been performed, was suddenly on sale in the London streets. It was about Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, and very soon had sold sixty thousand copies at threepence a time. Southey tried to obtain a court injunction to stop the sale, but failed; he took this rather stoically, despite attacks on him in the House of Commons. One MP accused the Poet Laureate of being a secret renegade and purveyor of sedition. The Whigs made great capital by pointing out, as they always did with Wordsworth, how he had changed sides: at first welcoming the Revolution, then turning against it. Southey’s reply to his critics was a good example of his polished prose: ‘They had turned their faces towards the east in the morning to worship the rising sun, and in the evening they were looking eastwards still, obstinately affirming that still the sun was there. I, on the contrary, altered my position as the world went round.’
Wordsworth thought Southey was now ‘completely triumphant … for a more disinterested and honourable man than Robert Southey does not breathe’. Many years later, Southey included the drama in a collection of his works, this time without apologies, saying that he was no more ‘ashamed of having been a republican than of having been a boy.’
If the Wat Tyler incident was a nasty trick, his enthusiasm for the Tories was to lead him unwittingly into another embarrassing situation in 1826. An admirer of his, the Earl of Radnor, a Tory feudal lord with Lonsdale-style power in the West Country, put him forward as an MP for Wiltshire, for a seat he controlled. Unfortunately, the letter in which the earl told Southey what he’d done arrived when Southey was abroad on an extensive tour of the Low Countries. Southey arrived back in Keswick, to find the town band out in the street, waiting to greet the new M P. ‘The whole posse of the place had assembled to see what alteration dignity had produced in my stature and appearance.’
The town was full of rumours, Southey said. According to one, he was now wealthy and worth £6,000 a year; according to another, he’d predicted the end of the world on Thursday last. He turned down the honour of being an MP, which he couldn’t have accepted anyway, as he was the recipient of a Crown pension.
Although Wordsworth and Southey had both become high Tories, Southey never went round begging the favours of the Tory lords. Southey, as much as Wordsworth, was indebted to Lord Lonsdale, who was one of the influential people who supported his name for the Laureateship and helped with his pension; but Southey did no spying or genuflecting in return. He would appear to have been uncorrupted by his rising success and his contact with the powerful. Both writers had by now certainly risen. The two Lake Poets were confirmed in their political and social attitudes and were united as dear friends and neighbours for the rest of their lives.
In 1817, William asked Southey to do him a favour. He knew that his friend was going on a trip to Europe and would be in Paris. He would be extremely grateful if Southey, while in Paris, could just somehow manage to look up a certain young lady, a girl called Caroline, as a personal service. William, so Southey related, had told him that ‘it would not be necessary nor pleasant to myself to be acquainted with the story of Caroline’s birth’.
Southey duly met Caroline in Paris. As soon as she realized that Mr Southey was such a close friend and dear neighbour of Mr Wordsworth, she blurted out the full story, telling him how William came to be her father. They had a tête-à-tête for about an hour, with Caroline having a good weep. Next day, Southey had breakfast with her and her mother Annette. He was very impressed by their love for William and by their lack of any resentment.
William must have known the full story would come out, which shows how he trusted and respected Southey. After all, not many friends knew about William’s French relations (although Crabb Robinson had been told). It is not known whether any of William’s legitimate children were ever told, though they may have found out.
Contact with Annette had of course been lost during the war against Napoleon, but letters had started coming through again in 1814, when Napoleon resigned his throne. They’d also made personal contact when a young French officer, named Eustace Baudouin, a friend of Annette’s family, visited the Wordsworths at Rydal Mount. He’d been a prisoner of war, captured by the English, and he brought first-hand news of how Annette and her daughter had fared during the long war. Like the Wordsworths, they were delighted by the end of Napoleon, as they were still staunch royalists and hoped for the return of the Bourbons—and perhaps also for some recognition, such as a pension, for all their dangerous work in helping royalist supporters.
In 1814, Caroline, now twenty-one, became engaged to Baudouin’s brother, Jean Baptiste, who was thirty-three and a minor civil servant. The letters were flowing freely between Rydal and Paris, where Annette and her daughter now lived. William was apparently a little worried by Baudouin’s financial position, and was concerned whether he would have enough money to support Caroline, but he gave his consent to the wedding. It’s interesting to note that the proprieties were kept, despite their lack of contact for well over ten years. William hadn’t written any letters, as far as is known, and even now, with his daughter about to get married, it was Dorothy who did all the corresponding. Annette would appear to have been the one most determined to keep up the contact—proud of her one-time English lover, and not ashamed of being called Madame William, nor of Caroline having an absentee father, now married to someone else.
Dorothy and Sarah made plans to attend the wedding—there was no sign of William wanting to go—but Sarah worried about travelling with no male companions and Dorothy wondered if it might not be better to save the travel money and spend it on a better wedding present for Caroline. There were many delays while they made up their minds, though Annette kindly put back the wedding date to suit their plans.
‘Both Caroline and her Mother urge my going in October,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘On this account, that, after a young woman is once engaged to be married, it is desirable that the delay afterwards should be as short as possible, as she is subject to perpetual scrutiny and unpleasant remarks, and one of the reasons they urge for marriage in general is that a single woman in France unless she have a fortune, is not treated with any consideration.’
World events overtook their domestic arrangements, as world events often do. Napoleon escaped from his exile on Elba in early 1815 and by March was advancing on Paris, becoming master of France once again. ‘For the sake of our Friends I am truly distressed,’ wrote Dorothy to Mrs Clarkson, referring, as she often did, to Annette’s family as ‘our Friends’, presumably to keep their identity as secret as possible. ‘The lady whom I mentioned to you from the first was a zealous Royalist, has often risked her life in defence of adherents to the cause and she despised and detested Buonapart. Poor Creature! The letter was concluded at midnight. My Friend says: “I hear troops entering the City. Good God! What is to become of us.” ’
As we know, world events came to the rescue. Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, though, as ten-year-old Dora said, when they were discussing Napoleon’s escape from Elba, as no doubt it was discussed in every British home, ‘Why did they not kill him when they had him?’
In February 1816, after endless delays and when it had become clear that William was not going to come, his daughter Caroline got married. She was described on the marriage certificate as the daughter of ‘William Wordsworth, demeurant à Grasner Kendan duche de Westmorland, Angleterre’. None of the Wordsworths was present at the ceremony. Annette, despite her slim resources, did her best to make a big show of the wedding, turning it almost into a royalist celebration: she laid on a grand dinner party and invited all her notable royalist friends.
‘The mother’s details of the wedding festivities would have amused you,’ wrote Dorothy to Mrs Clarkson. ‘She perhaps for half a year to come will feel the effects at every dinner she cooks! Thirty persons were present to dinner, ball and supper. The deputies of the department and many other respectable people were there. The bride was dressed in white sarsnet with a white veil, was the admiration of all who beheld her, but her modesty was her best ornament. She kept her veil on the whole of the day. How truly French this is!’
Over a hundred years later, this rather light-hearted account by Dorothy of Annette’s big day upset the distinguished French scholar Emile Legouis. He was the gentleman who did most to reveal the Annette connection in his book published in 1922 (William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon). As a Frenchman, he obviously felt rather protective towards Annette: ‘The mother had done her utmost, thrown away the last of her gold to attain, as it were, this exaltation of their daughter. What matter if she did it according to her ideas, which were those of a humble French bourgeoise and in the manner of her country. The absent father, the kind aunt herself who had not been able to come, would have done better to check their sense of humour.’
Professor Legouis also suggested that William, with his ‘£400 a year stamp sinecure’, could have helped them more financially. But, as we know, not only did William have to deduct from this figure a sum for payment of staff and expenses, he also had his own large household to provide for. No details exist of any dowry or wedding presents, but from this date, William did start sending an annual payment to his daughter of £30, which was generous enough, considering his circumstances. It was sent from London, through Daniel Stuart, of the Courier. This looks like a device to keep the arrangement private, or a way of preventing William from being directly bothered by the Baudouins. William faithfully sent the money every year, and in 1835 settled a lump sum of £400 on Caroline, bringing the financial arrangements to a close.
Caroline had a daughter just ten months after the wedding, in December 1816; the child was called Louise Marie Caroline Dorothée—the last name out of affection for Dorothy, who had always addressed Caroline in loving terms. There were two other daughters, but one died aged six. Some time later, Annette did finally get a small government pension from the returned royalists.
In 1820, William at last visited France again. On the way back from a European tour, he, Mary, Dorothy and Crabb Robinson took lodgings in the Rue Chalot, the street where Annette and the Baudouins were living. The first meeting between Mary Wordsworth and Annette, her husband’s former lover, took place in the Louvre and the encounter was as civilized as the surroundings. No outbursts of emotion were noted, no tears or recriminations. It was all utterly placid and pleasant. Annette and her family didn’t speak English and William’s French must have been rather rusty by now, since he had not been to France for eighteen years. It was at this time that William apparently gave his French family a pencil portrait of himself and a copy of the two-volume Collected Poems of 1815. One of the volumes is said still to be in the hands of the French branch of the Wordsworth family today.
Crabb Robinson thought the great meeting was perhaps a trifle too civilized. Caroline called Wordsworth ‘Father’, which he thought rather ‘indelicate’. But then, by 1820, William was a very civilized gentleman. Not all passion was spent, by any means, but a lot of his fervour—whether animal, political or emotional—was gradually subsiding.
The ‘Dear Child’ is Caroline, his daughter by Annette Vallon. He wrote the poem in August 1802, when Caroline was nine, walking along the Calais sands.
IT is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea;
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder—everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.