A FRIEND of Keats played a literary trick on William in 1819. He saw advertised a forthcoming poem by Wordsworth, ‘Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse’, and before it was published, and before he had read it, he decided to write his own version. To be parodied before publication might not be very amusing for an author, but it is certainly a sign of some kind of success.
‘Peter Bell’ had been written twenty years previously, but for various reasons William had never published it. He had contemplated doing so in 1815, but the bad reviews of The Excursion and The White Doe of Rylstone probably put him off.
Since then, there had been a perceptible change in attitude in the literary magazines: formerly critical publications, like the Eclectic Review, referred to Wordsworth and Southey in 1816 as the ‘two greatest living poets’ and gave a serious consideration of their respective merits and weaknesses. ‘There are passages in all his poems,’ they wrote of Wordsworth, ‘that are fitted with exquisite skill to find their way to the heart. But … when he aims to teach, he fails to please.’
There was therefore a reasonable glow of anticipation from the critics when the appearance of ‘Peter Bell’ was imminent, though not amongst the younger wits and witlings.
‘Wordsworth is going to publish a poem called “Peter Bell”,’ wrote Keats to his brother. ‘What a perverse fellow it is! Why wilt he talk about Peter Bells?—I was told not to tell—but to you it will not be tellings—Reynolds hearing that said “Peter Bell” was coming out, took it into his head to write a skit upon it call’d Peter Bell. He did it as soon as thought on. It is to be published this morning.’
The very name ‘Peter Bell’ struck them as highly ridiculous, but typical of Wordsworth, and they advertised their version in The Times, with the motto, ‘I am the real Simon Pure.’ The parody was published by Keats’s own publisher. Coleridge wrote to them, saying it was rather bad form and a breach of trust, but they replied that, as the author hadn’t seen a word of the original poem, they saw nothing wrong. The parody was complete with a Wordsworthian Preface and heavy notes, which even amused Coleridge. It was in the metre of ‘The Idiot Boy’ and contained what were now considered the characteristic Wordsworthian rustic characters.
Keats reviewed it anonymously for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner and the review was reprinted in the Kendal Chronicle, the local Whig paper which was against Wordsworth and the Tory Yellows. Keats did a clever double bluff, calling the skit false and ‘hurried from the press, obtruded into public notice while for ought we know the real one may be still wandering round the woods and mountains’.
Shelley wrote a much more serious skit on ‘Peter Bell’. He had the reviews of the joke one and the real one sent out to him in Italy. He called his ‘Peter Bell III’, using it as a vehicle to attack all the high Tories like Wordsworth, whom he blamed for the poverty and deprivation in the new industrial towns; but he was persuaded not to publish it, as it would harm his reputation—just as one imagines Wordsworth had been persuaded not to publish his radical pamphlet some thirty years previously.
Byron’s satire was much more gentle this time. He pretended he was writing a letter to a friend from Germany:
You are not aware of the works of William Wordsworth, who has a baronet in London who draws him frontispieces and leads him about to dinners and to the play; and a Lord in the country who gave him a place in the Excise and a cover at his table. You do not know perhaps that this gentleman is the greatest of all poets past, present and to come. His principal publication is entitled ‘Peter Bell’ which he has withheld from the public for one and twenty years—to the irreparable loss of all those who died in the interim and will have no opportunity of reading it before the resurrection.…
William had the last laugh. The real ‘Peter Bell’ was published in April 1819, with a drawing of Peter Bell done by Sir George Beaumont and a dedication to Southey, the Poet Laureate. The first edition of five hundred copies sold out in two weeks. Bad publicity can sometimes be better than none at all. No poetry by Wordsworth had ever sold so quickly. A reprint was immediately ordered.
All the same, the reviewers were obviously disappointed. Crabb Robinson and William himself feared they wouldn’t like the poem, but, on the whole, the reviewers were gentle in their criticisms, referring to William as a great poet, with some works of genius behind him, but sad that on this occasion he had failed. The Eclectic Review said he was ‘a poet that, after all, cannot be laughed down’. The British Critic, in a very long review, said that Wordsworth would always have enthusiastic admirers, in every age, and that people would always derive from Wordsworth ‘as high gratification as any poet is capable of bestowing’. At the same time, they said that, in every long poem of Wordsworth which was longer than a mere sonnet, a reader had to expect something not to his taste. Other reviewers, making the same point, put it more brutally. One suggested that all his best pieces should be collected in one volume, ‘while his idiots and waggoners were collected into a bonfire on the top of Skiddaw’.
Even today, the most passionate devotees of Wordsworth would admit that he has lapses, even in his finest poems. You are always tempting fate when you aim for simplicity, and for almost all of the thirty years that Wordsworth had so far been displaying his works before the public, the bad parts had blinded the critics to the good parts. In their reviews, they tended to reproduce, out of context, the more ridiculous lines, which naturally didn’t help sales. People then quoted the more awful parts at dinner parties, without ever having read the whole.
This time, with the publication of ‘Peter Bell’, there was only one really abusive review. It was in the Monthly Review (the Edinburgh Review doesn’t appear to have noticed the poem), which called it daudling drivel and infantine. ‘If a nurse were to talk to any of her children in this manner, a sensible father and mother would be strongly disposed to dismiss her without a character.’ Apart from that, every critic considered it a major work from a major poet.
It is hard to explain, or even date precisely, the change in feeling of the critical public. It seems to have started in about 1817-18, years in which Wordsworth did not publish any poetry. It could be said that after all these years before the public, resolutely going his own way, sticking to his poetic last and not being deflected, he had taught readers the taste by which his poetry should be appreciated, as Coleridge always said must happen. Looking back, people realized that there had been a lot that they had enjoyed and benefited from, despite all the easily parodiable material.
Coleridge himself helped immensely by the publication in 1817 of his masterly literary-philosophical Biographia Literaria. In this he wrote that it was Wordsworth’s prefaces that had caused all the abuse, but that now he stood ‘nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton’.
Despite twenty-five years of generally abusive reviews, many of them by minor writers, now long forgotten, almost all the best minds of the day did basically rate Wordsworth highly as a poet, whatever they might have thought of some poems or whatever they might have thought of him as a man. Keats, notwithstanding all the jokes, considered him a genius: ‘He is superior to us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed a light on them.’ Shelley acknowledged he was a ‘great’ poet, and even Byron was guilty of what was considered plagiarism of the Wordsworthian style in Childe Harold. Few writers of the day were not influenced by him in some way, whatever they may have asserted about him as a person.
Leigh Hunt, another of the London wits who scorned Wordsworth personally, put him amongst the three living poets who had characters of their own—the other two were Byron and Moore: ‘Wordsworth … is generally felt among his own profession to be at the head of it.’
Hazlitt, perhaps the keenest critical mind of his day, always admitted Wordsworth’s genius, though he had attacked Wordsworth for publishing that letter defending the character of Robert Burns, and had accused Wordsworth of being pompous and full of cant, and his poetry for lacking joy: ‘It is because so few things give him pleasure that he gives pleasure to few people.’ Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth’s devoted friend, was in the audience one day when Hazlitt expressed these opinions and was absolutely furious. ‘I lost my temper and hissed…’
But in 1818, in his Lectures on the English Poets (which were both delivered and published that year), Hazlitt described Wordsworth as ‘the most original poet now living … he has produced a deeper impression, and on a smaller circle, than any of his contemporaries’. Hazlitt still considered that Wordsworth was deficient in the mechanics of poetry, and unable to construct the perfect whole poem, but that as the leader of the Lake School of poetry, inspired by the sentiments of the French Revolution, he had been most responsible for rescuing English poetry: ‘Poetical literature had, towards the close of the last century, degenerated into the most trite, insipid and mechanical of all things in the hands of the followers of Pope. It wanted something to stir it up. The Deucalions who were to perform this feat of regeneration were the present Poet-Laureate and the two authors of Lyrical Ballads.’ This observation by Hazlitt in 1818, just twenty years after Lyrical Ballads was published, is still the accepted wisdom in literary circles today, though Poet Laureate Southey would not now receive such a kindly mention.
Wordsworth’s next publication was his own personal break-through. The year after ‘Peter Bell’—1820—saw the appearance of his series of sonnets on the River Duddon—and this finally established his literary fame and general acceptance. At the age of fifty, he at last received almost universal acclaim for a volume of his poems. Apart from all the praise for the beautiful sonnets, the generously long reviews hit back at his detractors. Blackwood’s Magazine, published in Edinburgh, and with half an eye on its deadly local rival, quoted extensively from the sonnets, saying they would ‘suffice to make our readers loath for ever all the cant about “Lakish Ditties” and “Pond Poets” and acknowledge at once that this author is a genuine English classic’. They considered that the Duddon poems showed there had been ‘total failure of all attempts which have been made to check the fame of Wordsworth’.
The Duddon sonnets are delightful to read—and display the joy Wordsworth had always felt in that beautiful stream, which rises near Wrynose Pass and flows south to the sea in Furness, through the prettiest valley in the whole of the Lakes. He’d gone there first as a young schoolboy at Hawkshead; that was the route of his fishing expedition, when he’d had to be carried back, tired out, on the back of the adult fisherman. He’d gone there many times since, though perhaps his nicest memory, one which had helped to inspire the poems, was of an incident which took place when he was alone on the banks of the river with Mary in 1811, returning from the seaside. ‘I have many affecting remembrances connected with this stream,’ he recalled. ‘These I forbear to mention, especially things that occurred on its banks during the later part of that visit.…’ They had been married almost ten years at that time, but it was one of the few occasions they had been alone on a journey together.
More poems followed in 1822, particularly his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, a history in verse of the Church of England which concided with the appearance of a book by Southey on the same subject. They were delighted by the accident, hoping they would help each other; but Wordsworth’s poems didn’t sell very well, though they were kindly received by the critics—apart from the Edinburgh Review, which was on the attack, as ever, abusing his new work as prosy, feeble, obscure, egotistical, puerile and worthless (all the things, in other words, that they’d been saying for twenty years without respite), and bringing in his Stamp job for good measure, saying he was now ‘blinded by the possession of a sinecure place’.
The strange thing about Jeffrey (later Lord Jeffrey), the editor of the Edinburgh Review and Wordsworth’s chief scourge, was that, in private, he maintained that he liked Wordsworth’s work and kept a copy of Lyrical Ballads on his desk. The magazine was of course a Whig publication, of which Brougham, the Westmorland election candidate, was cofounder, and they all genuinely hated and despised Wordsworth’s politics; but Jeffrey denied that his criticism had been inspired by politics and personalities. He just wanted to keep Wordsworth in his place, to counter the worship of his admirers and help him to rid himself of his faults and excesses. ‘I was always among Wordsworth’s admirers,’ Jeffrey told Crabb Robinson years later. ‘You had an odd way of showing it,’ replied Robinson.
William had, at long last, found fame on his own terms. ‘Up to 1820 the name of Wordsworth was trampled underfoot,’ said De Quincey. ‘From 1820 to 1830 it was militant.’ This didn’t necessarily mean that overnight the sales had boomed and the money was flooding in, but William was suddenly doing much better. Even his new admirers knew he could never have a mass following, like Scott. His poetry was always going to be hard for light readers. He didn’t, however, immediately exploit his newly acquired reputation; perhaps, indeed, he was hardly aware of the change in the atmosphere. No volumes of new poetry were published for the next ten years, from 1822 until the early 1830s. Instead, he was busy revising and publishing new editions of his old work. The 1820s turned out to be, creatively, rather a fallow decade, as if, at fifty, he was beginning to be deserted by his muse.
But in every other way it was an extremely active decade. After all, famous poets can be quite busy, just being famous, especially ones like Wordsworth, who enjoyed pronouncing on all subjects. With the increased income that his fame was bringing him, by helping to sell the new editions of his work, he was able to travel again and devote more time to his many family and domestic affairs, some of which were beginning to prove rather worrying.
One of the penalties of fame—or perhaps some might call it one of the pleasures—is that people go out of their way just to gape at you. As early as 1816, there were trippers coming to the Lakes, who hoped for a sight of Mr Wordsworth, as part of their itinerary. In that year, ‘fourteen Cantabs’ were spotted, doing a reading and walking tour of the Lake District. ‘Some have been introduced,’ said Sarah Hutchinson, ‘and I suppose most of them will find means to get a sight of the Poet before the summer is past.’ It became a normal feature of Rydal Mount from then on, with little huddles of visitors arriving at the gates during the summer months. Hazlitt, in his lectures in 1818, could mention Rydal Mount in passing, and everyone in the audience would know whose house he was referring to.
Undergraduates in debating clubs argued who was the better poet, Wordsworth or Byron, and after serious consideration of their respective merits, votes would solemnly be taken. Byron usually won in about 1816 or 1817; but after that, it was often a close-run thing. William was particularly liked in Cambridge, and when he went to stay with his brother Christopher, the Master of Trinity, he was always feted and dined and listened to with great attention. The first recorded letter simply asking for his autograph was sent in 1825—and William sent it off, with great pleasure. Letters were soon coming in from all over the world, especially from America. Little biographical memoirs of William began to appear in the magazines from 1819, usually with a portrait. A couple of people did approach him with a proposal to write a biography, but he dissuaded them. He wasn’t at all keen when a publisher—not his own—first wanted to issue an edition of his poems for school-children. A pirated edition of his collected works appeared in France in 1828, much to his annoyance. This was before the international copyright agreements. The Paris publisher produced his edition at little over a quarter the price of the equivalent English edition, thereby ruining the English sales, though he did send William a special vellum-covered presentation copy. William later went on to fight a long battle to get the British copyright laws changed and extended.
William generally refused to write for the magazines, sticking to his vow to try to live and work only as a poet, even when all the magazine editors wanted was to print his poems. ‘I have had applications, I believe from nearly every Editor but complied with none.’ However, in 1828 he gave in when a friend who was editing the Keepsake, a publication which included excerpts from all the best-known writers of the day, made him an offer he could hardly refuse, especially as he needed the money at the time for family affairs. They offered a hundred guineas for twelve pages of poems. He hadn’t written anything for a long time and during the 1820s he often observed in his letters that his poetic days were over. ‘My vein I fear is run out.… The Muses and I have parted company.’ But he managed to produce six sonnets, the only poems he produced to order, though, when the Keepsake appeared, he found they’d only used two. ‘I am properly served for having had any connection with such things.’
He had his bust sculpted in 1820. Copies were on sale to the general public for £5; for personal friends he could order copies at £3. He arranged for many members of his family to have one of his busts, including his three nephews—sons of his brother Christopher—when they each in turn distinguished themselves with university prizes and fellowships. It was the fashion of the day to have a bust of one’s famous friends or relations, or just one’s heroes, on the mantelpiece. William himself proudly displayed the busts of two of his poetical friends, Scott and Southey. ‘Your bust is nearly twice the size of the Laureate’s,’ he wrote to Scott in January 1826. ‘On Christmas Day my daughter decked the Laureate with the appropriate wreath and stuck a sprig of Holly in your Mantle and there it is, “with its polished leaves and berries” among the other indoor decorations.’
Famous people have of course to put up with nasty gossip in the magazines and newspapers, and tittle-tattle was soon appearing about the Wordsworth household: poking fun at all the ladies attending on him, or at his pride in his friendship with the Lowthers. The piece of gossip which hurt him most was a story written by Hazlitt in a series called ‘Table Talk’, still a popular name for a gossip column, which appeared in the London Magazine in 1821. Though Hazlitt admired William as a poet, he still kept up his personal attacks on him for praising the common people in his poetry, while ‘with one stroke of his prose pen, he disenfranchises the whole rustic population of Westmorland and Cumberland from voting at elections’.
The story which Hazlitt passed on had come from Charles Lloyd, William’s old friend and neighbour, who had now recovered from his bout of mental illness. According to the story, William, when he first lived in the Lakes, used to snuff out one candle when there were two on the table. ‘It was a shame to indulge in such extravagance,’ he was alleged to have said, ‘while many a poor cottager has not even a rush light to see to their evening’s work.’ This incident was said to have taken place in 1802, wrote Hazlitt. ‘In 1816 (Oh! fearful lapse of time, pregnant with strange mutability) the same enthusiastic lover of economy and hater of luxury, asked his thoughtless friend to dine with him in company with a certain lord and to lend him his man servant to wait at table; and just before they were sitting down to dinner, he heard him say to the servant in a sonorous whisper—“and be sure you don’t forget to have six candles on the table!” ’
The story highly amused the literary world, as tales had already gone round about Wordsworth’s meanness and about his relationship with the Lowthers, and here was a tale incorporating both rumours. William wasn’t mean—though he was certainly normally very frugal—but when he was entertaining ‘the quality’, the local beaux and belles could sometimes be seen enjoying themselves in his drawing-room, eating venison and pheasant which was often personally supplied by Lord Lonsdale.
Lloyd appeared unaware of the fury Hazlitt’s candle story had caused in the Wordsworth household and long afterwards sent William a volume of his poetical essays which had just come out. When he received no acknowledgement, he wrote again, asking if perhaps William didn’t like his little volume. William wrote back in a tone of high moral disgust, reprimanding Lloyd for his ungentlemanly conduct in passing on stories, misrepresenting him through knowledge he had acquired ‘as a guest invited to my table’. The truth of the story, Mary said in one of her letters, was that, in the first instance, William had ‘walked to see the reptile [Lloyd] thro’ the darkness and the glare hurt his eyes’. And as for the second anecdote, the servant had been borrowed to restrain Lloyd himself because of his insanity, and only two extra candles had been called for, not six.
William eventually forgave Lloyd, as he did most people who had caused him some offence. He was certainly never vindictive nor harboured grudges. John Wilson, the young admirer who had moved to the Lakes especially to be near him, then wrote some rather unpleasant things in a magazine, asked him for a reference when he was being considered for the post of Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. William kindly agreed and Wilson got the job. Wilson later had breakfast with William at Rydal Mount in August 1825, along with Sir Walter Scott and his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart. Canning, the Foreign Secretary, was also a visitor at the same time and became very friendly with William.
One of the grandest parties they ever had to entertain at Rydal Mount was when the Wilberforces were their guests in 1818. It was twenty-eight years since Dorothy had first met William Wilberforce—at the house of her clerical uncle in Norfolk—and had been teased by her friend that perhaps Wilberforce might have his eye on her. Wilberforce was now married, with six children, and arrived with a party of nineteen, including servants. They took two houses at the bottom of the hill, beside Rydal Mount, plus five beds in different houses in the village. An advance party arrived first, with the chief servants, to supervise the quarters and inspect the arrangements Dorothy had made for them—which didn’t please Dorothy.
First of all I had to receive 7 servants (William and Mary were at Keswick it the time) and on their arrival I was a little out of heart. Add to this the old Cook’s observation upon my answering one of her questions ‘such and such things must be sent for to Ambleside’ ‘Our men don’t like going errands, they are not used to it’ and her exclamation ‘what an inconvenient place’ when she found they could not get a drop of beer nearer than Ambleside—besides objections of the housemaid and kitchen maid to sleep upon a Matress.
All was satisfactory when the Wilberforce family did arrive, though Dorothy was not completely convinced about Mrs Wilberforce. ‘Mrs W. looked very interesting … when the family came … for she was full of delight and talked as fast as any of the young ones, but I must say that she has never since appeared to me to such advantage. Yet I like her very well, admire her goodness and patience and meekness—but that slowness and whininess of manner tending to self righteousness, I do not like.’
Many people, taken with Wordsworth and the local scenery, bought themselves homes nearby, just to be near him, such as Dr Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, who built himself a holiday home, with Wordsworth’s guidance, at Fox How. Arnold was a great radical, and they disagreed on education, religion and politics, but they became firm friends and both families enjoyed many social occasions together.
Other new friends of the Wordsworths were Edward Quillinan and his family, who arrived at a cottage near Rydal in 1821. Quillinan was an Irish cavalry officer, who’d met the Wordsworths in 1820-21, when he was quartered with his regiment in Penrith, and had subsequently left the army on half-pay, to settle in the Vale of Rydal. He and his wife named their second daughter Rotha, after the river near their cottage. Quillinan had published some verses, and his wife was the daughter of Sir Egerton Brydges, a noted literary figure of the day. Quillinan had an introduction to Wordsworth, but their first meeting wasn’t very successful. He’d several times been to the gate, once observing ‘Mr Wordsworth come out of his Cottage with a party of visitors among whom were some lovely young ladies’, but had lost heart and turned away. He eventually introduced himself and was shown in to the library at Rydal.
He received me very stiffly, but asked me for the letter. I told him that I had not brought it with me but that it was an open letter of introduction, but that it spoke of me in a manner so extravagantly laudatory that I had not the face to present it. He seemed quite angry; whirled a chair about and made short and stiff remarks. I was getting indignant and thought him most disagreeable. Suddenly the door opened and a young lady, rather tall of good features perhaps, not handsome, but of most engaging innocence and ingenuousness of aspect, stood at the door. Then it was that I saw the Poet’s countenance to advantage. All the father’s heart was thrown into his eyes and voice as he encouraged her to come in.
After that, thanks to the influence of Dora, William softened in his approach to Quillinan—and they all became firm friends, visiting each other’s houses. Dorothy, particularly, found Quillinan most engaging, a lively conversationalist and a trusted friend, and when Mrs Quillinan fell ill, Dorothy moved in with the family to nurse her. It turned out to be a fatal illness. She had had a mental breakdown and, while still recovering, accidentally burned herself and subsequently died. Dorothy was with her at the end, Quillinan being away in London at the time: Not long afterwards, Quillinan moved to London with his two young daughters, but the letters between the families were regular and very friendly, with love and kisses flowing from both sides. The Wordsworths usually stayed with him when in London.
It often surprises people to learn how sociable William was, with their London friends flowing through their drawing-room from May till September—the ‘Season’, as the Wordsworth ladies called it, rather wearily—and they in turn made constant visits to other friends, new and old. New friends discovered he wasn’t the recluse some still believed him to be, retired to the wilds to escape the world. The world came to him.
His brother Christopher, Master of Trinity, a position which, in theory, put him at the centre of the academic and theological world, was much more of a recluse. William’s personality was outgoing: he loved travel and tours and meeting people, and was a success at most social engagements, charming people by his rustic manners and dress—he looked more like a shepherd than a poet—and by his lack of affectation. On his home ground, he was often less interesting, going in too much for monologues. Away from home, he could be the life and soul of the party.
Wordsworth in town was very different from Wordsworth in the country [wrote William Jerdan, an editor who tried to get him to contribute to his journal]. In the former case he was often very lively and entertaining. I recollected meeting him at breakfast after his being at the Italian Opera the preceding night and his remarks on the singing and his limning of the limbs of the dancers were as replete with shrewdness and pleasantry as anything I ever heard from the most witty and graphic lips. I was so charmed both with the matter and manner, that I wrote immediately to offer carte blanche for his correspondence from the Continent.… Had he complied with my wish, and written letters in the tone and spirit of the criticisms of the opera, I am sure the public would have had a variation in the style of Wordsworth which would have surprised it.
During the 1820s, William made regular trips to London and the Continent. Almost every second year, he was off on one long journey of some sort, and so it is no wonder that his output of poetry suffered. He was often away from home for up to six months at a time.
The 1820 foreign tour—the one that ended in Paris, with the visit to Annette–started off in June in London, and the Wordsworths didn’t finally get back to Rydal until just before Christmas, having been through Belgium and up the Rhine by boat to Switzerland, then into Italy, retracing much of William’s old pedestrian route, that he took with his friend Jones almost thirty years previously. This time, they took carriages, having more money, though this didn’t stop William fretting endlessly when he felt he was being overcharged. ‘William at the inn door looked as fierce as Bonaparte,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘When he came bustling up to us after his conflict, M. and I said to each other “they will think that B. himself is come back again to threaten this poor town.” ’ On another occasion, William refused to take rooms at an inn because of the prices, and the whole party spent the night sitting in their coach. A thunderstorm roared and fleas crawled, and they had the most dreadfully uncomfortable night.
While they were in Switzerland, an English traveller came across them in a hotel in Lausanne, and has left a description of their little encounter which shows William at his most typically North-country-mannish:
The husband of one of them soon followed. I saw by their utilitarian garb, as well as by the blisters and blotches on their cheeks, lips and noses, that they were pedestrian tourists. The man was evidently a denizen of the North, his accent harsh, skin white, of an angular and bony build, self confident and dogmatic in his opinions. The precision and quaintness of his language as well as his eccentric remarks on common things, stimulated my mind.…
On their leaving the room to get ready for their journey, my friend told me the strangers were the poet Wordsworth, his wife and sister. Who could have divined this? I could see no trace in the hard features and weather-stained brow of the outer man, of the divinity within him. In a few minutes, the travellers reappeared. Now that I knew that I was talking to one of the veterans of the gentle craft, as there was no time to waste, I asked him abruptly what he thought of Shelley as a poet. ‘Nothing,’ he replied as abruptly.
In 1823, William was off again, this time just with Mary, on a much more modest Continental tour, visiting only Belgium and Holland. It lasted a month and was slightly marred by problems with William’s eyes. As usual, though, having left Rydal, he saw several other places and friends en route, and was away for five months in all. The next year, 1824, William didn’t go abroad, but he visited London, with Mary and Dora, and made a long tour of Wales, revisiting yet more old haunts. They watched the Menai Bridge being erected and visited Robert Jones. William composed several poems, trying them out aloud, while Dora sat beside him, sketching.
In 1828, William spent several weeks in London with Mary and Dora, staying at the Quillinans’. Sir Walter Scott was also in town, and the two parties jointly went round Hampton Court, along with several other literary people of the day, though, according to the poet Thomas Moore, who was in the party, the public had eyes for only one famous face: ‘Walked about in the gay walk where the band plays, to the infinite delight of the Hampton blues who were all eyes after Scott, the other scribblers not coming in for a glance.’ Well, when it came to best-sellers, not many people could compete with Sir Walter.
During this London trip, William established cordial relations with Coleridge, now settled and leading a much healthier life since he’d been taken in by Dr Gillman, a Highgate doctor. On what seems to have been a spur-of-the-moment decision, William, Coleridge and Dora decided to leave London for a quick tour of Belgium and the Rhineland, without even telling Mary they were going. William left in such a hurry that he only took a carpet-bag, borrowed from Crabb Robinson.
‘They get on famously,’ wrote Dora in her journal, following the family tradition for Wordsworth females to record all journeys. ‘But Mr C sometimes detains us with his fiddle faddling and he likes prosing to the folks better than exerting himself to see the face of the country. Father with his few half dozen words of German makes himself much better understood than Mr C with all his weight of German literature.’
In Brussels, they met another writer, the Irishman Thomas Grattan, who accompanied them on part of their journey. Grattan recorded:
Wordsworth was, if possible, more unlike what he must appear in the fancy of those who have read his poetry and have never seen the author. He was a perfect antithesis to Coleridge—tall, wiry, harsh in features, coarse in figure, inelegant in looks. He was roughly dressed in a long brown surtout, striped duck trousers, fustian gaiters and thick shoes. He more resembled a mountain farmer than a ‘lake poet’. His whole air was unrefined and unprepossessing.… But, on observation and a little reflection, I could not help considering that much that seemed unfavourable in Wordsworth might be really placed to his advantage. There was a total absence of affectation or egotism; not the least effort at display or assumption of superiority over any of those who were quite prepared to concede it to him.… I remarked Wordsworth’s very imperfect knowledge of French and it was then that he accounted for it by telling me that five and twenty years previously he understood and spoke it well but that his abhorrence of the Revolutionary excesses made him resolve if possible to forget the language altogether and that for a long time he had not read or spoken a word of it.
As William grew older and better known to the general public, the number of such first-hand descriptions of him, by people who met him on his travels or at London social engagements, or visited him at home in the Lakes, steadily increased. Almost everyone was struck by his lack of poetic manners and looks—which presumably means they expected a long-haired aesthete, a fragile and delicate flower like the young Keats, or someone who struck mannered poses like Byron. In the Lakes, William was often taken for a rather hard-up curate, in his unfashionable, worn-out clothes. Away from home, he appeared more the shepherd figure.
As he got older, he grew into his face. He’d never been handsome, with his knobbly features, prominent nose and receding hair, and his was a face that aged quickly. Not that he minded. He once reported a conversation he had on a coach, going back to Rydal, when his fellow-travellers tried to guess his age—one of them putting him at sixty. He was only thirty-six at the time.
‘Wordsworth’s was a face which did not assign itself to any class,’ wrote a friend, Henry Taylor. ‘It was a hardy weather-beaten face which might have belonged to a nobleman, a yeoman, a mariner, or a philosopher. For my own part, I should not, judging by his face, have guessed him to be a poet. Perhaps what was wanting was only physical refinement. It was a rough grey face, full of rifts and clefts and fissures, out of which … you might expect lichens to grow.’
There are fewer references, with his advancing years, to his alleged egotism, the trait which had once upset several people on first meeting him, such as Keats. Wordsworth had always denied that he was egotistical as a person. It was in his poetry that he was an egotist, as he was proud to admit. Perhaps, as time went on and he became better known, people encouraged his monologues, wanting to hear his wisdom, and never for one moment considered them a sign of egotism. He appears to have grown into his personality as well as into his physical appearance. Dogmatism does better suit the older man, especially one with so much hard-won experience of life and travel.
He went for five weeks to Ireland in 1829, his first visit, but moved round at such a rate—rising at five in the morning, in order to gallop to the next place or engagement—that he had hardly time to pause to think or even give his muse a chance. Almost every journey throughout his life spawned verses—even if they were written long afterward—including all his Continental tours, and his journeys in Wales and, especially, in Scotland; but nothing at all came out of his Irish visit. He didn’t have any members of his family with him this time—just some friends. Dora might have slowed him down, if she’d been there.
But he was well observed on his whirlwind Irish tour, with people remarking, as usual, on his rustic appearance and naturalness.
Everything he said and did had an unaffected simplicity and dignity and peacefulness of thought that were very striking [wrote one lady]. There was such an indescribable superiority, both intellectual and moral, stamped upon him in his very silence, that everything of his I had thought silly took the beautiful colouring of a wondrous benevolence, that could descend through love to the least and most insignificant things.… I think it would be quite impossible for anyone who had once been in Wordsworth’s company ever again to think anything he has written silly.
In the autumn of 1831, he made a long Scottish tour with Dora (now his favourite travelling companion), starting at Abbotsford, where they visited Sir Walter, then going to Edinburgh, the Trossachs and the Highlands, once again going over old haunts, the ones he had originally seen with Dorothy and Coleridge. He was now over sixty, but usually managed to walk twenty miles a day, often walking behind the carriage. His eyes were once again bothering him and he set off wearing a special shade which intrigued the children in Carlisle as they drove through. ‘There’s a man wi’ a veil and lass drivin’.’
They managed to reach Mull in the Western Isles, taking the new steamboat from Glasgow. ‘Father is hammering at a horrid sonnet and he cannot give me his ear for the moment,’ wrote Dora to her mother. ‘His eyes are wonderfully well considering he will work.’ There’s a nice parenthesis in this letter, giving an insight into their domestic relationships. ‘Mother you did not name his eyes in your last letter which he did not like!’
Wordsworth published no prose about his foreign tours, but a travel book he wrote about the Lakes, which originated very much by chance, sold better than any of his poems and made him famous amongst those who had never heard of his poetry.
Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, as it eventually became known, first appeared under his own name as a separate volume in 1822, but it began life in 1810, when William was asked to contribute, anonymously, some descriptions of Lakeland scenery to a collection of drawings made by a Norfolk vicar, the Rev. Joseph Wilkinson. He wasn’t particularly proud of the book and criticized Wilkinson’s etchings in a letter to Lady Beaumont, saying that Sir George would no doubt view them with disgust. One can only presume that in 1810 he had needed the money, though no record of the payment exists. He was always genuinely interested in guiding people to the Lakes and many of his letters give detailed descriptions of the best approaches and best routes.
As far back as 1807, after they’d been touring west Cumberland, Mary had suggested that he should write some sort of guide-book, and Dorothy was always well aware of the possibilities of a proper book, if he could expand his introduction to the vicar’s sketch-book. ‘It would sell better and bring him more money than any of his higher labours.’
It is surprising, in a way, that William took so long to write his own guide-book, considering that works of this kind were amongst his favourite reading. The book he eventually produced is a little didactic for modern tastes, though writers of contemporary guide-books were obsessed by the picturesque and by the desire to lay down the law on what was or was not a beautiful view; but the book is of great interest to anyone interested in the Lakes, or in Wordsworth. It finally sealed them together in the public’s mind. Indeed, it will be a central theme in the new Wordsworth Museum now being built at Grasmere.
As in his poetry, the moral teachings were not far away. In fact, only the first twenty pages are devoted to straightforward tourist information, after which he moves on to discussing such topics as ‘Causes of False Taste in Grounds and Buildings’ and ‘Effects of Light and Shadow upon the Vales’. He used the book as a vehicle for his personal hates, such as the current fashion for larch plantations or for whitewashing cottages. He said both ruined the natural beauty of the scenery. He considered himself an expert on such things and maintained that he had a calling for three professions: poet, art critic and landscape gardener. A lot of the new settlers did come to him for advice, on everything from their gardens to their chimneys, and he did much to create an awareness of the natural landscape. His great love for the Lakes shines through the book and he was amongst the earliest of the preservationists, forming guide-lines which were later followed by the National Trust, National Park and other bodies.
The book was in constant demand after it first appeared in 1822 and William regularly revised and expanded it. The fifth edition, which appeared in 1835, is looked upon as the definitive one, and a facsimile of it still sells well today.
It was Matthew Arnold who first told the story of the clergyman who asked Wordsworth if he’d written anything else—apart from his guide to the Lakes.…
During the 1820s, family affairs also took up a great deal of William’s time and thoughts. He would probably have gone on further Continental tours, if he hadn’t been worried so much about the education of his three children. He needed money for their schooling and he needed to be there in person to push them along. His two sons, particularly, needed all the help they could get. William, in his own teenage years, had been offered endless help and advice and contacts, as friends and relations rallied round to launch him into life, but he had spurned them all. Now he was the heavy father, refusing to even consider John’s wish, for example, to go into the army, an ambition William once had. He said the cost of a commission was impossible. ‘The Army is out of the question,’ wrote his mother. ‘He knows that; and strong as his bias towards the profession seems to be, at his age and in times of peace he would not give way to it.’
John was accepted at St John’s College, Cambridge, William’s old college, but his mathematics had been so bad at Sedbergh that he talked his father into letting him try to get into Oxford instead. So William then wrote to one of his influential Oxford contacts, John Keble, the great Oxford theologian, later Professor of Poetry.
‘I shall be greatly disappointed if we cannot get your son into Oxford,’ Keble replied. ‘It will be a real kindness to point out any little service that I can render to him, or anyone connected with you, there or anywhere else. For I feel deeply your debtor for the real advantage as well as for the great pleasure which I find in reading your publications.’
In 1823, John went up to New College, Oxford, aged twenty, where his tutor was another devoted admirer of Wordsworth’s works. John studied away quietly at Oxford, but without any distinction, failing to get an honours degree; William said it was because of ill health at the time of the examinations.
‘It would be most satisfactory to us if John’s thoughts should rest upon the Church,’ wrote Mary, ‘but this is a delicate subject, and unless his own mind—in conjunction with our own wishes, which are not unknown to him—led him thither, we should think it wrong to press him into the sacred profession merely to gain a worldly maintenance.’ It was history repeating itself; but this time, unlike William, John acted the dutiful son and agreed. The next stage, which was what his uncles had hoped for, for William, was to get John a fellowship somewhere, till it was time to take holy orders.
One has to admit William’s pushing was masterly. He left no contact untapped. Not only did he write off about an imminent fellowship to his well-connected friends, such as Lord Lonsdale and Canning; he sent off duplicated lists of the Electors—‘to spare you the trouble of consulting the Oxford Callendar’—so that his powerful friends could cast their eyes at once over the list of people who would choose the Merton College fellows, and identify any they could influence. Lord Lonsdale turned up trumps, and named one such person. ‘I see two names on the list of voters which you have enclosed,’ replied Canning, ‘with whom it is possible that, if not pre-engaged, the expression of my wishes on your Son’s behalf may have some weight.’
Alas, after all that valiant string-pulling, John was disqualified for the Merton Fellowship on a technicality. It turned out that his birthplace in the Lakes put him in the diocese of Chester (today, it’s the see of Carlisle), and they already had a fellow. Poor William had to write and apologize to Lord Lonsdale, and his other friends, for all their work. He now had to support John himself till it was time for him to take orders, which John did in 1828, when he took up a curacy in Leicestershire, in an area full of impoverished stocking-weavers, which wasn’t quite the sort of clerical position William had in mind for his elder son. However, it was near Coleorton, the Beaumonts’ family home, and the vicar in charge was, again, a personal friend of William’s.
Dorothy, who was now established as the family’s travelling housekeeper and nurse, when she wasn’t looking after the home while they were all away, went down to Leicestershire for the winter of 1828, to join John in his lonely and draughty parsonage and help him set up a home, though William, having done so much for him, realized that he was now on his own. ‘He will be thrown for advancement and maintenance upon his own exertions.’
Dora, as we have seen, had by now become William’s regular travelling friend and companion, another lady in his household. In a way, she took over from Dorothy: a fresh source of female comfort and pleasure at William’s side, an eager sightseer, a keen observer of the world and an excellent letter-writer, though slightly sharper than Dorothy in her gentle teasing of her father. ‘This letter with the usual Wordsworthian coolness is to give note that the two Poets and their amiable Daughter hope to steam it from Ostend Tuesday,’ she wrote to Quillinan from her Low Countries tour with William and Coleridge. ‘Yesterday a pouring rain at Rotterdam gave Father time to half persuade himself into an Ague—but the symptoms have disappeared—I am a saucy Child as you know full well. He had a little cold from damp feet, was a little doleful and I was wicked enough to say it was ague.’
In one of her Rydal letters, to a girl friend, she passed on a tit-bit of local conversation, having overheard what a neighbour had said about her father’s impending return from a long absence: ‘Why then we shal hae ’im booing again in that wood; he boos like a bull enough to freighten a body.’
Dora’s health was a constant worry for her father and mother. ‘She is a complete air gage,’ wrote her mother in August 1827. ‘As soon as damp is felt the trouble in her throat returns—something connected with the trachea, that causes a cough and other inconveniences.’ To protect her from the Lakeland winter, they sent her south, from September to May, to stay with a friend, with William soon joining her, and she was away for a year in all. It seemed to help her quite considerably.
She was devoted to her father, and he to her, though some family friends thought that it was a little unhealthy for such a lively girl, now approaching her late twenties, to be devoting her life to her father. ‘I have my suspicions,’ wrote Hartley Coleridge in 1830, ‘that she would be a healthier matron than a virgin, but strong indeed must be the love that could induce her to leave her father, whom she almost adores, and who quite doats upon her.’
Willy turned out to be the biggest problem of all. After leaving Charterhouse in 1822 when he was twelve, he spent the next six years at home, supposedly being educated locally at Ambleside, but, in practice, doing and learning very little. William tried to put a brave face on it, telling Walter Scott in a letter in 1825 that Willy had left Charterhouse as his health had failed, ‘and is now with me preparing for Oxford’. In the winter of 1827, when his parents were in the south with Dora, hoping for an improvement in her health, Willy began thinking of the army. Dorothy, who was left at home looking after him, wrote to Quillinan, hoping he might put Willy off, having been in the army himself. ‘His thoughts turn (I fear constantly) on the Army. What have you to say for and against the profession? Not I expect much for it. And he seems little inclined to listen to the contra-side.’ Without telling his parents, Willy did apply for a commission—but was turned down.
William tried to get him a position in business, looking for openings in a counting house when he was in London, contacting manufacturing concerns and, as always, applying to Lord Lonsdale for help, hoping he might procure some minor government position. Lonsdale replied that he’d been trying for two years to get a similar position for another friend’s son, and offered little hope. ‘He must go somewhere,’ moaned William, yet knowing he was so slow at learning of any sort, with a mind not disposed to the notion of books, that there were few openings. Willy had grown out of his early years of ill health, when the whole family had fussed over him, so that was one blessing. ‘He is in excellent health,’ wrote William, ‘nearly six feet high and for the exercise of walking equal perhaps to any man in Westmorland. Notwithstanding, I am afraid, that severe confinement, with hard head-labour, would revive his old complaint.’
Even with his outdoor activities, which he appeared to love best of all, Willy wasn’t all that successful. ‘We are yet in a painful sort of uncertainty what is best to be done for Willy,’ wrote his mother to Quillinan in November 1828. ‘You shall hear when a decision is made, which ought to be shortly. Meanwhile, he does not make much havoc among the Snipes and Woodcocks—but he has caught a bad cold in search after them, wading up to the knees does not suit him.’
William, in the same letter—it was often their custom to share letters to family friends—regretted the fact that Canning had recently died (in 1827). ‘Had Mr Canning now been living, I would have stated his situation, and given briefly Wm’s history to him, and I am simple enough to believe, for Canning had a respect for literature, and was a good natured man, that such a step would not have been without effect. As things are, his Mother and I are very anxious about him.’
William wrote round to several places about possible tutors or crammers, at home and in Europe, where Willy might be sent to learn a language, or learn something. At length, in 1829, they packed him off to Bremen, hoping a knowledge of German might help him find some sort of an occupation.
Domestically, life was very settled at Rydal, though there was one slight shock in 1826 when Lady Fleming, their landlady, said she wanted the house for her heir and the Wordsworths would have to leave. William bought the field adjoining the garden for £300 and threatened to build his own house in it, getting plans and designs ready, but Lady Fleming and the heir eventually let them remain. William later gave the field to Dora, and it’s still known as Dora’s field, a mass of daffodils every spring and much admired by visitors to Rydal.
Sarah Hutchinson, Mary’s sister, was still part of the family, living most of the time with them, and a very jolly household it was. Dorothy often talked in her letters about Sarah and William having jokes together, on one occasion making up a skit on a well-known poem. ‘The first stanza of Ben Jonson’s poem slipped from W’s lips in a parody—and together they finished it with much loving fun. Oh! they laughed. I heard them in my room upstairs and wondered what they were about.’
Mary had blossomed as the years went on, judging by her increasing part in the Rydal Mount correspondence. As she accompanied William on most of his travels, she wrote many of the letters afterwards, keeping up with their new friends. ‘From Idle Mount, which just now well supports that title,’ she wrote in 1827, ‘I have nothing but good to communicate.…’ That Idle Mount joke appears to have been hers, and she repeats it in other letters. The joke was true, as well, when one considers the Southey industry at Greta Hall. Old William had produced no new volumes for years and young Willy was still hanging around the house.
Dorothy and William were still a devoted sister and brother, despite Dorothy’s now secondary role. She continued to go off on her lone little travels, most of them mercy visits, though she did have one good holiday in 1822, when she went to Scotland with Joanna Hutchinson, Mary’s sister. They did a lot of walking, proving she was still as strong as ever, but, like William, she was visually ageing quickly. As early as 1819, when just forty-eight, she was telling her old girlhood friend Catherine Clarkson that the years had caught up with her. ‘You will be surprised when you see me, in face a perfect old woman. I have only eight teeth remaining-two in the upper jaw, the rest below and those two or three are on the point of coming out. William preserves his teeth and does not look older for his years than formerly.’
Just a few months later—in 1820, when she was in London with William and Mary—Dorothy realized her teeth had had their day. William wrote round to the leading dentists, comparing prices and references, as if he was dealing with innkeepers, and was somewhat alarmed that the best dentist was going to charge fifty guineas to make Dorothy some dentures. However, it was decided that she had to have them made, regardless of expense. She was delighted to get rid of her old teeth, and felt much more comfortable, but knew it didn’t improve her looks: ‘For now my mouth is drawn up to nothing and my chin projects as far as my nose; but I look healthy enough, though I have lost 8 lbs since I was last weighed, being now only 6 stones 12 lbs.’
Nonetheless, she was always ready and willing to go off on any long walk with William when required, and in 1828, aged fifty-six, she was boasting in a letter that she could still walk fifteen miles as briskly as ever.
William’s own health was remarkable. In 1830, when sixty, Dorothy, with sisterly pride, wrote that he was still the crack skater on Rydal Water. ‘And as to climbing of mountains, the hardiest and the youngest are yet hardly a match for him.’ There’s no record of him ever having a day in bed because of any illness, even having colds and coughs, though he did have one nasty accident when he fell off his horse. It bolted as he was trying to mount it, and he was thrown against a stone wall and badly cut his head. He was never much of a rider, and usually preferred to walk, though he did one marathon ride, on his own, from Lancaster to Cambridge on Dora’s pony, encountering tremendous thunderstorms and other adventures. He contented himself, and forgot his discomfort, by composing verses for Sir George Beaumont as he sat in the saddle, soaked to the skin.
His eyes were his only physical problem, and even his temperate habits, to which his family ascribed his normally perfect health, did nothing to alleviate them. He often found that he was unable to read for more than fifteen minutes without a hot and prickling sensation at the back of his eyes. In a letter to Charles Lamb in 1830, he told him he had the books he’d sent but was waiting for better light—he was writing in January—as he could no longer read at all in candlelight. ‘But alas, when the days lengthened my eyesight departed, and for many months, I could not read three minutes at a time.’ He did have good spells and he was always surrounded by enough helping eyes and hands, who could read to him and write his letters for him.
Although he was still very careful with his money, he was in a much better financial state by the 1820s than he’d ever been, despite the cost of his children’s education. The new editions of his poems sold well and he expanded his stamp duties to embrace further areas. In 1821, he reported to Lord Lowther that he was collecting £18,000 a year in stamp revenues—you can see why the ladies were so worried when he was absent—but that only £200 in cash ended up in his pocket. In the same letter he bemoaned the fact that he was unable to take much advantage of a perquisite which usually came the way of a Distributor: ‘I might gain something by leaving it in my Banker’s hands till the end of the quarter were it not that the Currency in my district consists mainly of provincial notes, principally Scotch, on which the Bankers allow no interest till they have had them six weeks.’
In 1825, he decided he wasn’t making enough money from the sale of his books and told Longmans, his publishers, that he was going to look elsewhere. William had been particularly upset when he’d discovered that so much of his profits were taken up by paying for their advertising costs, which appears to have been a custom of the time. He was also worried that some of his books were out of print. In reply, Longmans said they were sorry, but Wordsworth was a slow seller and they couldn’t improve their terms.
Wordsworth got his friends to do the pushing for him, as he so often did, asking Samuel Rogers to contact the eminent publisher John Murray. William had decided in his head that he wanted a new edition of all his works, in some six volumes, for which he wouldn’t take less than £300, and without any advertising expenses being charged.
Murray appeared very keen, so Rogers reported, but nothing happened. Rogers then went to see Murray in person several times, and Murray said how much he admired Wordsworth and his poems, but still no contract was forthcoming, nor even a letter. Finally, after many months of silence, William, greatly upset, told Rogers not to bother with Murray any more. ‘I am persuaded that he is too great a Personage for anyone but a Court, an Aristocratic or most fashionable Author to deal with.’
Negotiations then began with another publisher, but they fell through—the publisher turned out to be going bankrupt—and William was forced in the end to go back to Longmans, where he lowered his terms, though he got a slightly better deal than he’d had in the past. In 1827, a new edition of his poems at last appeared on the book-stalls.
William was always careful in all his financial affairs, writing endless letters to ask for advice when he had money to invest—and he often had quite a lot. In 1820, he was thinking of investing £2,000 in French stocks. In 1825, he had £500 available for railway shares. He was as temperate and sensible, careful and calculating with his money as he was with most things in his life. It was typical of his luck and prudence to escape from joining the publisher who was going bankrupt, just before the catastrophe happened, when he might well have suffered with him.
They were all terribly upset at Rydal when the news of Sir Walter Scott’s financial disaster came through in 1826. His complicated publishing investments had collapsed and Scott became responsible for huge debts—and was himself declared bankrupt.
Poor Sir Walter Scott! [wrote Dorothy]. I was indeed sorry to hear of his name in the Gazette—I did not see it myself and was in hopes there might be a mistake on the part of my informer. But the Sale of furniture, Books etc etc too clearly confirms the truth. How could it happen that he should so enter into trade as to be involved in this way. He a Baronet! A literary man! A lawyer. I wish very much for particulars. How does he bear the Change? I hope well, but am fearful that Lady Scott may not be fortified to the needful point having heard that she was a person fond of distinction and expense.
They were very fond of William’s own distinction at Rydal Mount, now that he was famous, and were proud of his poems and his newly acquired favour with the critics; but they, like William, didn’t go in for any expensive show. They were all too sensible.
The last of his Duddon sonnets, which were based on his memories of journeys down the Duddon valley in the Lake District, especially with his wife Mary. They were published in 1820 to general acclaim.
I THOUGHT of Thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away.—Vain sympathies!
For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;—be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.