DOROTHY, who had been an invalid for the last twenty years of William’s life, outlived him by five years, dying in 1855, aged eighty-three. Mary lived longest, dying of old age at eighty-eight, in 1859. It says much for their policy of plain living and high thinking that all three lived to be octogenarians.
Mary’s first task, on William’s death, had been to take out from its resting place the ‘poem of his own life’, as it had always been called, and send it to Moxon, the publisher. The dedication was still to S.T. Coleridge, as it had been when William had begun it, some fifty years previously. It was Mary who named it The Prelude.
Almost immediately after William’s death, there were approaches from Baudouin, the husband of William’s French daughter Caroline, who maintained he and his wife should have a share of William’s estate, despite the fact that in 1835, when William had finally settled £400 on Caroline, Baudouin had signed a document agreeing that William’s financial obligation was at an end. Annette had died in 1841, aged seventy-five; from what is known of her character, it is unlikely that she would have allowed such grasping behaviour, had she still been alive. Caroline herself was now fifty-eight, and her two daughters were grown up and married. Baudouin, however, threatened to come to England, ‘to look after his interests if necessary’, so Crabb Robinson recorded in his memoirs. He and Quillinan conferred on the best way to deal with him, fearing that money would be the price of his silence, as there were hints that he would publish certain revelations. They took legal advice and sent a long letter in French but nothing more, apparently, was ever heard of the matter.
Caroline herself died in 1862. She was survived by her two daughters, the elder of whom (the one who included Dorothée among her names) married twice, bearing two daughters, who in turn produced seven children. Today there are several direct descendants of Wordsworth, living in France. On the legitimate side, there are many direct descendants of the poet living in England today, including five great-great-grandchildren.
Mary’s next problem, after the publication of The Prelude, was a biography of William. She knew that he had been against any formal work of this kind, believing that his best biography was his collected poems and that an additional brief memoir would be sufficient for posterity. It had been thought by many friends and relations that Edward Quillinan might write the official biography, and he himself hoped that he would; but in 1847, the year of Dora’s death, William and Mary had quietly drawn up an agreement with William’s nephew Christopher by which he was to be given permission to write a biography and was to be offered all the help he would need. This happened at a time when Quillinan and William were temporarily estranged. Quillinan knew nothing of the agreement until a week after William’s death. Nonetheless, he gave Christopher all the help he could, making available the invaluable notes which Miss Fenwick had made and had given to Dora.
When the two-volume biography was published in 1851—it appeared in the same year in the United States, edited by Henry Reed—many friends thought it dwelt too much on the conservative and religious side of William’s life, glossing over his revolutionary and anti-clerical youth. It was also thought a shame that someone who hardly knew him should have been entrusted with the task. Today, the book is still not considered by some scholars to be very valuable, but it does contain many first-hand explanations of the background to his works mainly based on Miss Fenwick’s notes, which are still primary sources. It probably helped to reinforce the general Victorian view of Wordsworth as a stern, god-fearing, humourless figure. It contains almost nothing about Mary. There is indeed a chapter entitled ‘Marriage’, but it is one of the shortest chapters in the book, only five pages long, and consists almost entirely of quotations from William’s poems. Did Mary refuse to provide any details about herself? She was known to be against such a publication, as being contrary to William’s wishes, but had allowed it to go ahead, not wanting further family disagreements.
Strangely enough, Dr Christopher Wordsworth, then a Canon of Westminster and later Bishop of Lincoln, wanted to include something of the Annette relationship. He maintained that it was a commonplace rumour and that someone had even mentioned it to him in the street. He did, apparently, include some information about it in his first draft, but Crabb Robinson and Mary, who wished to ‘prohibit it absolutely’, Crabb Robinson said, persuaded Christopher to omit everything. The only reference, in the published version, was to Wordsworth being ‘encompassed with strong temptations’ while in France, which Crabb Robinson still worried might give a hint of some sort of immorality. But, as we know, nothing about Annette became public till the 1920s.
The publication of The Prelude in 1850 did not turn out to be as important an occasion as Wordsworth might have hoped. The 1830s had been William’s greatest decade for sales, critical acceptance and general popularity, but, in the 1840s, Tennyson was quietly coming to the forefront. The publication in 1850 of In Memoriam coincided with Wordsworth’s death, and was Tennyson’s most successful publication so far—and it helped to secure him the Laureateship. For the next three decades, Wordsworth suffered something of a decline, as Tennyson became the great Victorian poet. It wasn’t until 1897, when the French scholar, Emile Legouis, produced his study of The Prelude, that the importance of the poem was fully realized, though by then, many of Wordsworth’s poems were back in critical favour again, thanks mainly to the works of Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s careful selection in 1879 of the best of Wordsworth in the ‘Golden Treasury’ series was a best-seller. At a time of falling creeds and religious doubts, Arnold pointed the way back to Wordsworth—though, at the same time, he was very aware of his faults.
Wordsworth’s faults have always been well recognized, from the Edinburgh Review onwards. It was Coleridge who observed that a work of art should never be judged by its defects, which is a good basic rule for all critics; but, in a way, Wordsworth’s defects are part of his fascination. They have caused him to be more parodied than any other English poet. In his lifetime, Byron, Shelley and Keats all had sport at Wordsworth’s expense, and this continued throughout the nineteenth century, with wits and witlings sharpening their baby teeth on him, from Thackeray (whose first published work was a Wordsworth skit) to Lewis Carroll (’I saw an aged, aged man,/A-sitting on a gate’).
The best-known satirical poem about Wordsworth, by J. K. Stephen, appeared in Granta in 1891 and includes the lines
There are two Voices; one is of the deep,
And one is an old half witted sheep
And Wordsworth, both are thine.…
The Two Voices of Wordsworth have been an endless source of study to this day, although it was Hartley Coleridge who first put his finger on the two-sided Wordsworth: ‘What a mighty genius is the Poet Wordsworth! What a dull proser is W.W. Esqre of Rydal Mount, Distributor of Stamps.’ Tennyson referred rather neatly to Wordsworth’s sheep-like verse as his ‘thick-ankled’ element.
Between the World Wars, with the emergence of T.S. Eliot and a starker, urban, intellectual poetry, most of the Romantic poets suffered a slight eclipse, but today the Romantic movement generally is in favour, as we perhaps try to escape back to nature and the senses, to basic truths and simple pleasures. Wordsworth is probably more studied today in universities round the world than he has ever been, but he has never really been away. In his poetry and in his life, the giant Wordsworth has left more than enough for each of us.
‘Wordsworth was nearly the price of me once,’ so Philip Larkin, the poet, said in an interview in the Observer in December 1979. ‘I was driving down the M1 on a Saturday morning; they had this poetry slot on the radio, “Time for Verse”. It was a lovely summer morning and someone suddenly started reading the Immortality ode, and I couldn’t see for tears. And when you’re driving down the middle lane at seventy miles an hour … I don’t suppose I’d read that poem for twenty years. It’s amazing how effective it was when I was totally unprepared for it …’