The period during which Wordsworth and Coleridge were thinking and writing about society in England runs from eighteenth-century England, before the French Revolution, through the Napoleonic Wars and the social unrest which followed them and was imaged in the massacre at Peterloo and the Cato Street conspiracy, into Victorian England. At the beginning of their time England was still predominantly an agricultural country. Political power was largely in the hands of the aristocracy (the great landed proprietors), and the squires, the smaller landed gentry. Beneath them were the yeomen, the small independent farmers and tenant farmers, and the peasantry, who were regarded, paternalistically or brutally, depending on the individual landlord, as Property (Coleridge’s definition). There was also an increasing number of men, newly made rich by mills or trade, who joined the ranks of the aristocracy—never in fact as rigidly exclusive as the great noble houses of France—and there were the rich Dissenters, men excluded under seventeenth-century laws from political life and some high professional positions, but clever and hardworking, who had put all their energies into trade and into science.
The main social changes and problems in this period concerned two related matters—the changing relationship between the old agricultural sources of power and money and the new industrial ones—mills, machinery, mines—and the condition of the poor. Both of these were aggravated by the rapid increase in population—from seven million in the middle of the eighteenth century to over thirteen million in 1815, and increasing at the rate of about two million every ten years. And these people were, relatively, concentrated in large towns, a completely new feature of English society—Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and London itself, which in 1815 contained one million people. The birth rate rose, and the death rate fell—hospitals were dangerous places due to lack of medical knowledge and hygiene, but changes in town structure and domestic life helped—timber was replaced by brick in building, sewers were laid, cotton clothes were easier to wash than the old heavy cloth, and the habit of washing the body spread, even though Beau Brummel wrought a minor revolution at Court by his insistence in personal cleanliness, and one of George IV’s objections to his bride was that her underwear smelled.
The number of the poor grew too. Both industrial and agricultural workers suffered from poverty—industrial workers from the increasing use of machinery to do work formerly done by men, and agricultural workers, and also the independent tenants and yeomen farmers, because of the increasing tendency of the times to favour the landowners and large tenant farmers who, with improved methods of farming and new enclosures, could afford to increase their livestock and pay tithes and poor rates. These problems had been present before the Napoleonic Wars and the workers had resorted to activities like machine-breaking (as early as 1779), although the wars had temporarily unified the country and made complaints or action seem unpatriotic. Crabb Robinson in 1815 wrote: ‘When Buonaparte threatened Europe with his all-embracing military despotism, I felt that all other causes of anxiety and fear were insignificant.’ Coleridge in 1814 at the proclamation of the peace noticed popular enthusiasm. The coach bearing the news was dragged by the people through the streets of Bristol, later illuminated with lighted transparent pictures and fanciful allegories. Coleridge designed one himself and was worried about ‘the imminent danger of Conflagration … with three of us constantly watching the abominable Lamps’, but was moved by the huge crowd which flowed like ‘a vast deep and rapid River’ across the square ‘and the contrast of this with the thing to be seen! A red Wheel-barrow on men’s Shoulders with no one in it—without exaggeration an old Petticoat on a Broomstick would have made as fine a Shew.—O man! man! ever greater than thy Circumstances.’
But Crabb Robinson noted a great lack of deep popular enthusiasm at the news of Waterloo, and both he, Coleridge and Wordsworth became increasingly worried about the poor in the times immediately succeeding the war. In 1816 Robinson noted five or six cases of arson a week, popular protest against the use of thrashing-machines at Bury, and commented: ‘The want of work by the poor, and the diminished price of labour, have roused a dangerous spirit in the common people—when roused the most formidable of enemies.’ The poverty was increased by the return of the soldiers, many now unemployed. And the government’s attitude was not felt to help.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a strong general feeling that the poor were in the condition to which God had called them. William Paley, in his Reasons for Contentment (1781), preached to them their luck. Property entailed responsibility but the poor were in a unique position to develop the Christian virtues of ‘dependence and subordination’. In 1849 the Quarterly berated Jane Eyre for being ‘a murmuring against the privations of the poor, which is a murmuring against God’s appointment’. Philanthropists had felt otherwise—the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor was founded in 1796, and Sir Frederick Morton Eden’s three-volume summary of the state of the poor appeared in 1797. But there was a strong party which believed that to help the poor rendered them over-dependent, lazy, prolific, unwilling and unable to help themselves.
The Poor Laws were in an odd state. The Poor Act of 1601 entitled parishes to levy a poor rate—different parishes used this power to very varying degrees. In 1795 the Speenhamland magistrates made their famous decision not to fix the wages of agricultural workers (they feared that more would become unemployed) but to supplement their wages with poor-law allowances tied to the price of bread and the size of the family. This was intended to help, and to preserve the workers’ independence, but it had the opposite effect, and resulted in the pauperization of whole rural communities. The landowners paid lower wages, knowing they would be supplemented, and arguing that it was from their pockets that the poor rates came anyway. By 1818 Poor Relief came to £8 millions—and the poorer ratepayers and the Members of Parliament were seriously worried about supporting a lazy army of dependent and greedy paupers. Southey, through his Don Manuel, expresses his indignation at this, and describes the paupers’ dread of the workhouse—a place of horror then described in Crabbe’s poems, and later in the novels of Dickens, whose characters would rather die than go there. It was a place inhabited indiscriminately by vagrants sent for punishment, unmarried mothers, orphans, and the helpless—idiots, madmen, the blind, the palsied and the senile. And parishes had been known to drive the old to die in the streets and women to give birth there, so that the funeral, or the new baby, should not be at the cost of the parish. As Southey furiously pointed out, the poor-rate wage supplements were parsimonious, lest the poor man indulge in drink or idleness, with the result that none could save, and all labourers, thrifty and lazy, became dependent on the parish in the end.
The Corn Law of 1815 aroused further unrest and resentment. It was introduced to keep up the price of bread, and prohibited the import of foreign corn until English corn reached 80s. a quarter: the intention was to make things safe for landlord, farmer and labourer. But it had various bad effects. Large fluctuations in price were caused by hoarding and rushing in corn from abroad when there was a bad harvest and English prices rose above 80s. The price of the quartern-loaf rose and labourers could no longer afford other agricultural products—bacon, beer, eggs, milk, meat—so they and the farmers suffered. The city-dwellers and industrial workers were also hit by the high price of bread and demanded higher wages. They also began to murmur against the predominant agricultural interest represented by the Members of Parliament, and to urge Parliamentary Reform. Riots and machine-breaking were prevalent, as well as peaceful associations of labouring men to better themselves. The Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, in which Arthur Thistlewood planned to assassinate all the Ministers of the Crown as murderers of the innocent at Peterloo, only convinced the governing classes that the people were dangerous. Peterloo, where the Manchester Yeomanry and the 15th Hussars over-ran and killed several of the large and peaceful crowd agitating for universal suffrage and repeal of the Corn Laws, convinced the people that the Government, with Wellington in the Cabinet, ruled by the sword. Penal reform was slow—as late as 1832 a person could be hanged for sheep-stealing, house-breaking and forgery. Machine-breaking became a capital crime in 1812. It was 1829 before a regular police force (championed by Wellington and Peel) replaced government spies and troops as enforcers of law and order.
Attitudes to all this varied. Cobbett, preaching petitions for reform and believing that England’s golden age had been destroyed by the industrial revolution, refused to look at a machine lest he be corrupted. He created a durable image of the vanishing idyllic English peasant on the land, was imprisoned for his radical views, and continued to produce his newspaper in prison. Robert Owen, risen from poverty to great wealth, tried to prove in his model factories in New Lanark that health and fair wages for workers actually provided better economic advantages for the mill-owners as well. There were tentative political attempts to better the condition of children in factories, chimney sweeps and other sufferers, but in spite of the terrible evidence produced by doctors and others about the evils of long hours of child labour, and brutality amongst sweeps, the Bills took years to pass. This was partly because the manufacturers produced evidence in their favour and the agricultural squires in Parliament were unacquainted with conditions in the mills, and did not imagine them. It was also, at a more abstract level of ideas because the beliefs held by the Members of Parliament, such as they were, were against interfering with the right of any individual to run his life and his business his own way. The classical economists believed that economic flows, like rivers, would ‘find their own level’ without violent interference. Lord Liverpool’s government’s belief in ‘laissez faire’—let us, and things, alone and they will improve—was a reflection of this. Liverpool liked to quote Samuel Johnson:
How small, of all the ills that men endure
The part which Kings or States can cause or cure.
Poverty and suffering were acts of divine Providence. In this connection it is worth noting the views of two thinkers who had a powerful effect on the poets, particularly on Coleridge. William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice inspired the young Coleridge to address a sonnet to him as one ‘form’d t’illume a sunless world forlorn’, whose
Voice, in Passion’s stormy day,
When wild I roam’d the bleak Heath of Distress
Bade the bright form of Justice meet my way
And told me that her name was HAPPINESS.
Godwin’s views of human nature were essentially Utopian and optimistic—remove unjust divisions of property, educate the poor out of ignorance and unreason, and vice and misery would disappear in the clear light of justice. Coleridge was, in his later days, embarrassed by his early attachment to Godwin’s republicanism. But it was Godwin’s view that ‘There is a principle in the nature of every human society, by means of which everything seems to tend to its level, and to proceed in the most auspicious way, when least interfered with by the mode of regulation’, coupled with the consequent belief that ‘the number of inhabitants in a country will perhaps never be found, in the ordinary course of affairs, greatly to increase beyond the facility of subsistence’ that aroused the intellectual anger of the clergyman Robert Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population was designed to demolish this easy comfort. Population could, indeed would, outrun the means of subsistence, precisely because men were better off—the people, particularly the poor, had only been kept in check by misery (war, famine) and vice (murder and extravagance leading to starvation). He later revised his essay to suggest that populations could be kept down by ‘moral restraint’ (abstention from sex) as well as misery and vice. He aroused great hatred, including that of Coleridge, who wrote notes all over his copy of the Essay, indignant that Malthus should suggest that sexual passion was as irresistible as hunger (his own, after all, was not and he believed in the will), indignant at Malthus’s despairing view of human nature as essentially irrational, corrupt, torpid and lazy. But although Malthus was hated, his view of the population problem haunted the governing classes, and gave strength to the belief that poor relief only made men lazier, more dependent and more numerous. Indeed it helped towards the Poor Act of 1834, which diminished outdoor relief and concentrated on workhouse relief deliberately made unattractive. It took many years to convince the governing classes that state interference with natural events and with people was a lesser evil and less dangerous than simply ignoring them. And, ironically, by the time Dickens came to write his great black novels Bleak House and Little Dorrit, the state was felt to be as much to blame for the suffering of the helpless as the wicked or unfeeling mill-owner and outdated aristocrat. The Circumlocution Office strangled the people as effectively as Sir Leicester Dedlock.
What follows is an account of the poets’ attitudes during their lifetime to this changing social scene.
They record a certain amount of social gossip about the doings of high society. The young Dorothy Wordsworth was wildly excited on a visit to Windsor in 1792 to be introduced to George III and his family. She wrote
I fancied myself treading upon Fairy-Ground and that the gay company around me was brought there by Enchantment …. I think it is impossible to see the King and his Family at Windsor without loving them, even if you eye them with impartiality and consider them really as man and women … but I own I am too much of an aristocrate not to reverence him because he is a Monarch more then I should were he a private Gentleman.
Wordsworth at this stage was a Republican, and believed in what the innocent Dorothy then called the ‘new-fangled Doctrine of Liberty and Equality’, so it was perhaps fortunate that he was not with her. But George III went mad and the charming but dissipated Prince Regent took over. Coleridge in 1804 was reporting to Southey
the King will certainly die—Fox’s Coalition with the Grenvilles is avowed—and the Prince’s Life was last week despaired of from a frenzy fever, the consequence of 3 days’ drinking/the two first Claret and Port, did not affect him or his Rivals, the D. of Norfolk and E. of Guildford—on the third day they each drank 2 bottles of Sherry, 2 of Madeira, and a bottle of Noyeau with several Glasses of Brandy—and the Hereditary Earl Marshall waved his flag triumphant over the prostrate Heir Apparent and the Earl—
There was much public grumbling about the Royal expenditure, in which Dorothy joined: in 1816 she says she hopes the Ministers will be ‘frightened into more efforts towards economy; but what an immense Royal Family have we to maintain and the Princess of Wales spending her money abroad!’ But Wordsworth’s sonnet on the death of George III, in 1820, mad and blind, is moving:
dread Shadow of a King!
Whose realm had dwindled to one stately room;
Why should we bend in grief, to sorrow cling
When thankfulness were best?
Coleridge in 1814 is indignantly disparaging the gossips’ and moralists’ attempts to denigrate Nelson, whose letters to Lady Hamilton were published that year:
In the name of God, what have we to do with Lord Nelson’s Mistresses or domestic Quarrels? Sir A. Ball [Governor of Malta] himself exemplary in this respect told me of his own personal knowledge Lady Nelson was enough to drive any man wild—He himself once heard her at Nelson’s own Table at Breakfast when two Lieutenants were present reproach and worrett him about his beastly infidelities in the Mediterranean. She had no sympathy with his acute sensibilities; and his alienation was affected tho’ not shewn before he knew Lady Hamilton, by being heart-starved still more than by being teized and tormented by her sullens. To the same enthusiastic sensibilities, which made a fool of him with regard to his Emma, his Country owed the victories of the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar—
There is more than a little of Coleridge himself in this picture of the ‘heart-starved’ hero—but he was purely shocked by Canning’s duel with Castlereagh in 1809:
Good God! what a disgrace to the nation—a Duel between two Cabinet Ministers on Cabinet Disputes!! And not a Breathing of its hideous Vulgarity and Immorality in any one of the Papers!. Is it possible that such minds can be fit to govern?
In their early years the poets were deeply, altruistically concerned with the sufferings of the poor, and remained so all their lives, although their political views underwent a sharp change from republicanism to High Toryism. In 1801 Coleridge was berating immigrants to America for grumbling about bad society, vulgar manners and insolent servants in a world where, according to him, there was ‘no poverty but as a consequence of absolute idleness’, by comparison with England, where ‘the laborious Poor are dying with grass within their Bellies!’ He noted in his commonplace book in about 1795–6: ‘People starved into War.—over an enlisting place in Bristol a quarter of Lamb and piece of Beef hung up.’ But the war also impoverished, and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, which records a steady flow of beggars past her door, gives details of many destitute wounded men, or women whose husbands had been killed in the war. A typical entry is the one about a young woman who had come with ‘two shillings and a slip of paper which she supposed a Bank note—it was a cheat. She had buried her husband and 3 children within a year and a half—all in one grave—burying very dear—paupers all put in one place—20 shillings paid for as much ground as will bury a man—a stone to be put over it or the right will be lost—11/6 each time the ground is opened.’ There was the little boy who, when asked if he got enough to eat, ‘looked surprised and said “Nay”. He was 7 years old but seemed not more than five.’ From Dorothy’s encounter with a family of beggars came Wordsworth’s Beggars: and partly from the account in her journal Wordsworth created that monumental, stony figure of pure, poverty-stricken existence, the Leech-gatherer. He was
‘an old man, almost bent double. He had on a coat, thrown over his shoulders, above his waistcoat and coat. Under this he carried a bundle, and had an apron on, and a night-cap. His face was interesting …’
He had had a wife and 10 children, all dead but one, from whom he did not hear, a sailor ‘His trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce and he had not strength for it. He lived by begging, and was making his way to Carlisle where he should buy a few godly books to sell.’
Leeches were growing scarcer, owing to a dry summer and being gathered too much; they ‘did not breed fast and were of slow growth. Leeches were formerly 2/6 per 100; they are now 30s.’
Wordsworth’s sympathy for, and capacity to recreate, these solitary, wandering poor men and women is one of his great strengths as a poet. Through him the Leech-gatherer, the Traveller of Guilt and Sorrow, discharged from the army, driven by poverty to murder, the Female Vagrant of the same poem, the soldier met on the road in the Lake District, the blind London beggar of The Prelude, become symbols—all the more powerful because Wordsworth simply describes them and his emotional response to them—of a basic element in the human condition, one of emptiness, stripped of importance and therefore important. The soldier stands still in the landscape—‘in his very dress appeared
A desolation, a simplicity
To which the trappings of a gaudy world
Made a strange background
… his form
Kept the same awful steadiness—at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not.
And he tells Wordsworth his tale with ‘a strange half-absence’ like one
Knowing too well the importance of his theme
But feeling it no longer.
And the blind beggar, with his story written on paper and pinned to him, seems the isolated, the pessimist, entirely significant:
Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
As with the might of waters; an apt type
This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And on the shape of that unmoving man,
His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed
As if admonished from another world.
Here Wordsworth’s distant capacity to remain, as Coleridge put it, a ‘spectator ab extra, feeling for but not with his characters’ produces much better poetry than Coleridge’s rush of ready personal sympathy. The following is an early poem of Coleridge’s, The Outcast:
Sweet Mercy! how my very heart has bled
To see thee, poor OLD MAN! and thy gray hairs
Hoar with the snowy blast: while no one cares
To cloathe thy shrivell’d limbs and palsied head.
My father! throw away this tatter’d vest
That mocks thy shivering! take my garment—use
A young man’s arms! I’ll melt these frozen dews
That hang from thy white beard and numb thy breast.
My SARA too shall tend thee, like a child:
And thou shalt talk, in our fire side’s recess
Of purple Pride, that scowls on Wretchedness—
Coleridge’s genuine sympathy shows better in the precise economic details collected in his notebooks than in this blend of Shakespearean histrionics, self-aggrandisement, and eighteenth-century abstractions.
Wordsworth’s Ruined Cottage, incorporated in The Excursion, is perhaps the most vivid image there is of the effects on a self-respecting man of loss of employment. Margaret’s husband is one of
shoals of artisans
From ill-requited labour turned adrift
To hang for bread on parish charity.
and Wordsworth’s picture of his uselessness is moving:
And whistled many a snatch of merry tunes
That had no mirth in them; or with his knife
Carved uncouth figures on the heads of sticks.
And Coleridge in 1803 was observing the efforts of the families engaged in spinning wool at home:
3 and nearly 4 days work for a stout woman, a stout Girl and a feeble old woman, 1 Stone of wool, for which they get £0, 2s, 10d/spinning from 7 in the morning to 9 at night, of course using Coal and Candle; they can do it in 3 days; but then they have to reel it and carry it … at least 5 miles—O women are hardly off!
On the tour of Scotland which they all went on in 1803 they were again close observers of the poverty of the people. Dorothy attributed the constantly repeated ‘Ye’ll get that’ of the Highlands to ‘a perpetual feeling of the difficulty with which things are procured. We got oatmeal, butter, bread and milk …’ She describes a whisky hovel, with unglassed windows and half a roof, ‘little better than a howling place for the winds’ in which at least half a dozen people to her surprise seemed to subsist, ‘dealing out whisky to the starved travellers’. And Coleridge grew indignant at the twelve-year-old village of Springfield, built for workmen, mostly weavers, by Sir William Maxwell: ‘O what dreary melancholy Things are Villages built by great men / cast-iron Hovels / how ill does the Dirt and Misery combine with the formal regular shapes. Are they cells of Prisons? It is the feeling of a Jail.’
More than Wordsworth’s respect for Godwin, his respect for the ‘statesmen’ of Cumberland and Westmorland led to his early republicanism and also to his poetic idealization of rural life. The ‘statesmen’ were peasants who owned their own small estates—Cumberland and Westmorland had few resident nobles, and comparatively little of the extreme poverty the Wordsworths observed in the Highlands and Dorset. The people were democratic, independent, and self-respecting. Wordsworth idealized them: they were his education: was it not to be expected
That one tutored thus should look with awe
Upon the faculties of man, receive
Gladly the highest promises, and hail
As best, the government of equal rights
And individual worth?
These ‘statesmen’ were finding it harder and harder to survive against the economic pressures of the time. Dorothy records a conversation in 1800 with a certain John Fisher who ‘observed that in a short time there would be only two ranks of people, the very rich and the very poor “for those who have small estates” says he, “are forced to sell and all the land goes into one hand”.’ By this time Dorothy, the ‘aristocrate’ of the meeting with the King, is scornful of riches. An entry in her journal runs: ‘We had a pleasant conversation about the manners of the rich—avarice, inordinate desires, and the effeminacy, unnaturalness and the unworthy objects of education. After the Lloyds were gone we walked—a showery evening. The moonlight lay upon the hills like snow.’
They may at this stage have despised the rich and their education, but Wordsworth could not share Godwin’s belief that property is a cause of vice. In The Last of the Flock, and the later Michael he draws a most moving picture of the slow attrition of the personality and energy of the self-respecting smallholder with the loss of his property. With the loss of property, Wordsworth felt, went natural emotions. The hero of The Last of the Flock is moved by poverty to ‘wicked deeds’ and ‘wicked fancies’. He is carrying the last lamb of his flock to sell:
Sir, ’twas a precious flock to me
As dear as my own children be;
For daily with my growing store
I loved my children more and more.
God cursed me in my sore distress;
I prayed, yet every day I thought
I loved my children less;
And every week and every day
My flock it seemed to melt away.
In 1808 the Wordsworths organized an appeal for the children of such a smallholder who had been killed in a snowstorm—one of the children they took in themselves. Dorothy’s description of their poverty is detailed and distressing:
They were the poorest people in the vale, though they had a small estate of their own and a single cow. This morsel of land, now deeply mortgaged, had been in the possession of the family for several generations; they were loth to sell it and consequently they had never had any assistance from the parish … The cow was grown old, and they had not money to buy another. They had sold their horse and were in the habit of carrying bridles, or anything that they could spare, to barter for potatoes or bread. Luxuries they had none. They never made tea, and when the neighbours went to the children they found nothing in the house but two boilings of potatoes, a very little meal, and a few pieces of lean dried mutton …. You will wonder how they lived at all and indeed I can hardly tell you. They used to sell a few peats in the summer which they dug out of their own hearts heart—their land—and perhaps the old man (he was 65 years of age) might earn a little money by doing odd jobs for his neighbours; but it was never known till now (by us at least) how much distressed they must have been. See them when you would they were always cheerful; and when they went from home they were decently dressed. The children too, though ragged, are clean ….
Wordsworth’s ‘Utopian vision’ of country people, if it can be called that, appears more in the polemic of his prefaces and that rather polemical and over-designed poem The Excursion than in his poems of feeling, where a kind of blank statement of the nature of things, poverty, dignity, decay, produces its own emotion. But the criticism of his dogmatic assertions by Coleridge and Hazlitt has its interest and justifications. Coleridge in Biographia points out that ‘to the formation of healthy feelings and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture’—but this is the theoretical side of the tragic emotional decay precisely observed by Wordsworth himself in The Last of the Flock and The Ruined Cottage. But Coleridge goes on to point out that ‘education or original sensibility or both’ are a prerequisite of the response to ‘the changes, forms and incidents of Nature’ desiderated by Wordsworth. If these do not exist men may be made ‘selfish, sensual, gross and hard-hearted’ through the narrowness of the country life. He concludes
Let the management of the Poor Laws in Liverpool, Manchester or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor rates in agricultural villages where the farmers are the overseers and guardians of the poor. If my own experience has not been particularly unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable country clergymen with whom I have conversed on the subject, the result would engender more than scepticism concerning the desirable influence of low and rustic life in and for itself.
Hazlitt bears this out in his essay on The Character of Country People, where he opposes the narrow petty life of his own Wiltshire village to Wordsworth’s vision of natural feelings. He criticizes Robert Owen, too, for visionary Utopian belief in the goodness of man—borne out in the failure of Owen’s attempt to found an ideal Community in America if not in New Lanark. And he defended townspeople. Mr Wordsworth in the Preface to the Excursion, he said, ‘represents men in cities as so many wild beasts or evil spirits, shut up in cells of ignorance, without natural affections, and barricaded down in sensuality and selfishness.’ If man in London really did not know his next-door neighbour, ‘the feelings (one would think) must recoil upon themselves and either fester or become obtuse’. But of course it is not so; man in London is, as Burke has it, a sort of ‘public creature’, and has a meaningful communal life, as well, larger and more varied. Therefore he is better equipped, according to Hazlitt, to form political ideals. Hazlitt, the city-dweller, was a Republican, and interested in the development of these independent city minds, with their sense of the government of large communities, into good, reforming Radicals. The City of Westminster was a Radical seat because the social life of its inhabitants led them to understand the ideals of government and the concept of ‘the people’ as a political force. Wordsworth, and Coleridge too for all his understanding of Liverpool, Manchester, and Bristol, became conservative in the true sense of the word. Both saw English life primarily in terms of the proper management of agriculture and organic agricultural communities; both—with, however, many qualifications—saw industry and commerce as threatening forces. They were to some extent justified: even as late as 1851 agriculture still employed one out of four Englishmen over twenty and there were more agricultural labourers than cotton workers, domestic workers, and general labourers. Adam Smith had believed that merchants who became country gentlemen made the ‘best improvers’ of land and estates and that therefore industry and commerce enriched the country. But many of the traditional landlords were ‘improvers’ too—Thomas Coke of Norfolk, who never bothered with his title as First Earl of Leicester, was the most famous. Coleridge too was interested in the scientific improvement of agriculture: in Scotland he had a long conversation with a priest ‘concerning the uses and properties of limes and other manures’, and when Wordsworth and Dorothy were amused by the incongruous appearance of an ‘uncommonly Luxuriant’ field of bright gold grunsel next to one of clover and one of potatoes he ‘was melancholy upon it, observing that there was land enough wasted to rear a healthy child’.
The reactions of the two poets to the popular agitation about the 1815 Corn Law differed. Wordsworth believed that ‘the advocates for the Corn Laws are in fact the friends of the poor; though … they may be mistaken as to the best price to fix on’. He thought the price of 80s. too high because rents were already unnaturally high, and if they were kept up by this price for corn people would suffer. He thought it possible that the price of corn might fall if it did rise near 80s., if importation became likely ‘so that it is possible that the price may answer for the good of the community’. But he does not seem to have foreseen the fluctuations in price caused by these drops and the hardship caused by both importation and the artificially high prices of English corn. What he did feel strongly was that the people’s dislike of the Corn Laws was unjustified:
Nothing can be more deplorable than the errors of the mob; who seem never to have had a thought that without a restriction upon importation no corn could be grown in this country, and consequently that it would become insupportably dear; and perhaps could not be got at all.
The poor, the individual peasants, were objects of his detached sympathy, but the other aspect of them, ‘the mob’, was beginning to make him and many other Englishmen increasingly uneasy. He had, after all, lived to regret his enthusiasm for the French revolutionary people in his disgust at the anarchic Parisian mob. In 1816 there were riots in Suffolk about the Corn Laws and Dorothy wrote to her friend, Catherine Clarkson, wife of the philanthropist Thomas Clarkson, historian of the Quakers and the abolition of the slave trade, about
the degree of apprehension you might entertain for the property of your Brothers and other Friends … I trust that you, being out of the circuit of the Riots, are safe, and surely the Poor could not by any possible means take the fancy that Mr Clarkson was their enemy! … Perhaps the newspapers exaggerate the mischief; but at best it must be very great. In this part of England we are happy—no public disasters seem to touch us. Labourers feel the benefit of the cheapness of corn; and their wages are not much reduced; so that except for those that have property we have little or nothing of complaints—and they are only suffering under an evil which they can well bear, and which will certainly pass away.
The tone here is moderate; it was not to remain so.
Coleridge, too, was indignant at the thought of the ‘mob’ and its possible outrages. In 1812, the day after the assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, he wrote to Southey suggesting that Southey should write an article on the ‘sinking down’ of Jacobinism (democratic, radical beliefs) ‘below the middle and tolerably educated Classes into the Readers and all-swallowing Auditors in Tap-rooms etc. of the Statesman Examiner, Cobbett etc.’. He had little or no respect for the working-class Cobbett’s radicalism—he called Cobbett the rhinoceros—and a deep suspicion of the popular Radical, Sir Francis Burdett, M.P. for Westminster (who nevertheless was a Tory squire and shared Coleridge’s beliefs about the sanctity of kingly government and the English constitution). He went on to tell Southey: ‘I have ascertained that throughout the great manufacturing Counties … [their] Speeches, and the leading Articles of the Statesman and the Examiner are printed in Ballad Form and sold at a half-penny and a Penny each.’ Coleridge, who was ‘turned numb, and then sick’, by the news of the assassination went into the tap room of a large public house to recover, and was dismayed by the ‘atrocious sentiments universal among the Populace—and even the lower order of Householders … It was really shocking—Nothing but exultation—Burdett’s health drank with a clatter of Pots and a Sentiment given to at least 50 men and women—May Burdett soon be the man to have Sway over us! … This is but the beginning … more of these damned Scoundrels must go the same way—and then poor people may live—’.
But in 1815 he was speaking at a public meeting in Bristol to petition Parliament against the Corn Bill, and declaring his pleasure at being able to show that his support of the Tories had been conscientious, not dictated by interest; he was truly indignant at the Bill’s ‘Injustice and Cruelty’. Mounted on a butcher’s table he ‘made a butcherly sort of speech of an hour long to a very ragged but not butcherly audience: for by their pale faces few of them seemed to have more than a very occasional acquaintance with Butcher’s Meat. Loud were the Huzzas!—and if it depended on the Inhabitants at large, I believe they would send me up to Parliament.’ He saw the Bill as a commutation of the War and Property Taxes to a Poll Tax, ‘not proportioned as the Property Tax in some measure was, to the ability of the Payer, but pressing heavier the lower it descends—so that the poorest pays the most, not only virtually, as being so much less able to pay it, but actually, as making Bread so very much larger a proportion of his whole sustenance’. He even went as far as declaring that Parliamentary Reform was now necessary since the masters, the landowners and great farmers had dared to establish a minimum price and maximum quantity of ‘the Poor Man’s cold, dry Dinner’. They assumed the loaf’s price would not rise above a shilling—but it would be ‘at 16d. and may be at 18d.’. ‘As to the pretext that Wages will rise in proportion, the proper answer, however vulgar, would be—a Lie!’
On particular abuses they felt strongly. In 1802 Dorothy recorded a meeting with a sailor who had been pressed into the Navy, and had twice swum from a King’s ship in the night and escaped. ‘He would rather be in hell than be pressed’. Fishermen were hunted down by soldiers through fields of standing corn where they tried to hide from the press gang. In 1808 both Coleridge and the Wordsworths were writing to influential friends to procure the release of Sara Hutchinson’s younger brother Henry, who was pressed after all kinds of adventures—the Navy took from him his own ship after a storm, he was taken prisoner in Mexico for nearly two years, and when he got home was pressed again. This Henry had also travelled on a slave ship, The Betsey, and recorded a particularly grisly incident of a slave merchant called Davies who nailed two boys by the ears on his dinner table for bringing him a dirty plate—Henry and the captain of The Betsey refused to eat with this man and dined afterwards on deck. The wandering sailor too told stories of atrocities in slave ships—‘one man had been killed, a Boy put to lodge with the pigs and half eaten, one Boy set to watch in the hot sun till he dropped dead …’.
Wordsworth wrote a sonnet to Thomas Clarkson on the abolition of the slave trade and Coleridge, describing Clarkson’s History of the Abolition, praised its ‘moral beauty’ and called it ‘that immortal war—compared with which how mean all the Conquests of Napoleon and Alexander’. He himself wrote a Greek Ode against the slave trade, and a long essay, and Southey wrote twelve sonnets which were very popular. There was an interest in Africans and Negroes: Coleridge writes of a Professor Blumenbach who had ‘a complete Library of books written entirely by African Blacks’, books in every science and art. When the Queen of Haiti visited the Clarksons the Wordsworths composed a parody of Ben Jonson’s ‘Queen and huntress’, beginning ‘Queen and Negress chaste and fair’, and referring to the ‘holy shade’ of ‘Wilby’ (Wilberforce): they later suffered some embarrassment lest the poem was in bad taste. Wordsworth had to correct the painter, Benjamin Haydon, when he wanted to introduce him into his painting of the Anti-Slavery Society at Freemason’s Hall—he ‘must on no account be introduced’ as he had played no active part, despite his lively interest.
But in later years he was lukewarm about the abolition, declaring that the people of England, whose laws had allowed slavery, could not in strict logic fanatically sweep it away without either the slave or the English people compensating the owner for his loss—and the slave could not do much more than perhaps offer some of his services. He was still troubled by the sanctity of property—as Coleridge saw the agricultural workers as property, so Wordsworth saw slaves, and argued from there that to be a man’s property might be a better protection than being a free worker, to be exploited. He argued from the analogy of the measures then being considered to prevent cruelty to animals—cruelty was more, not less, likely if the law did not consider the animal a man’s exclusive property. He refused to contribute to an anti-slavery anthology because he was ‘not prepared to add to the excitement already existing in the public mind’. He was on the right side, but he was gloomy about the nature of men in society:
I do not only deplore, but I abhor [the slave trade] if it could be got rid of without the introduction of something worse.
In 1801, many years before the Factory Act of 1819, the poets had been interested in the fates of the workers, particularly the children, employed in mills. Coleridge’s dangerous acquaintance the revolutionary John Thelwall described the factory children in a poem:
a race
Of infant slaves, broke timely to the yoke
Of unremitting drudgery—no more
By relative endearment, or the voice
Of matronly instruction interspers’d—
Cheering or sage; nor by the sports relaxed
(To such how needful!) of their unknit prime
Once deem’d the lawful charter.
Coleridge in the same year was busy with one of his Utopian plans—for malting acorns for home consumption, as acorns flourish even when harvests are bad:
Should it be true, that the Oak is fructified by superficial Irrigation, what a delightful Thing it would be if in every Plot adjacent to Mountain Cottages stood half a dozen noble Oaks, and the little red apple-cheeked children in drouthy seasons were turning a small Fire engine into the air so as to fall on them! Merciful God! what a contrast to the employment of these dear Beings by a wheel or machine in a hellish Cotton Factory!
Wordsworth, in The Excursion, describes the plight of these children, exhausted by long hours, cramped in mind and body by an imprisonment they carry with them even when they leave the factory, and the plight of the mothers, their domestic rhythms and sense of purpose broken by the departure of the children. There is a touching description of the boy
His raiment, whitened o’er with cotton flakes
Or locks of wool, announces where he comes.
Creeping his gait and cowering, his lip pale
His respiration quick and audible;
And scarcely could you fancy that a gleam
Could break from out those languid eyes—
He introduces this description with the scornful remark:
Economists will tell you that the State
Thrives by the forfeiture—unfeeling thought,
And false as monstrous!
Coleridge was active in the agitation in 1818 for the Cotton-Children Bill. He wrote two tracts on the subject arguing against the principle that it was illegitimate to interfere with free labour and property: ‘In what sense, not utterly sophistical, can the labour of children, extorted from the wants of their parents, ‘their poverty but not their will consenting’, be called free?’ Employers have no right to purchase and men have no right to sell the labourer’s health, life, and well-being. And in letters he is indignant about the behaviour of ‘that Scotch Coxcomb, the plebeian Earl of Lauderdale’, who wanted to make a speech, to display his ‘muddy three inch depths in the Gutter of his Political Economy …. Whether some half score of rich Capitalists are to be prevented from suborning Suicide and perpetrating Infanticide and Soul-Murder is, forsooth, the most perplexing Question which has ever called forth his determining faculties, accustomed as they are well known to have been, to grappling with difficulties.’
In 1817 Dorothy Wordsworth, staying in Halifax, observes the effects of poor trade on the woollen industry. The country she says, is really beautiful except for the ‘odious cotton and worsted mills—and steam engines—which are really now no better than encumbrances on the ground’. Some mills are kept going to supply work—but few get more than half work. The population is reduced to pauperism—whole streets kept alive by public charity and families ‘broken down—that is their expression’. Dorothy tells her friend that ‘making clothes for poor people is a good thing’. In some parts of England women may still be able to sew for themselves, but in Halifax ‘the manufactories have kept them ignorant of plain work’. She concludes that it cannot be expected, or even wished, ‘that the state of our manufactures should again be what it has been—but people and things cannot go on as they are’.
In later years, Wordsworth’s fear of the mob and of a popular uprising increased. In 1812 he wrote that for thirty years ‘the lower orders have been accumulating in pestilential masses of ignorant population’. In 1817 he warmly approved the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, declared himself an alarmist, and said that though he thought a Revolution could be staved off, and the Cumberland and Westmorland population was at present sound—they might not remain so if rebellion grew elsewhere. This he ascribed to the slackening of the community’s organic sense of the classes’ ‘vital and harmonious dependence on each other’. There was no longer any vital feeling of attachment between landlord, farmer and labourer—the large new farms were worked by gangs of ill-paid and half-pauperized labourers, often without local roots. The ‘feelings’ Wordsworth so much valued had also disappeared from business relations within country towns. In Wordsworth’s lifetime country squires and substantial yeomen had bought from the same shop as generations of their ancestors, breeding ‘substantial amity and interchanges of hospitality’. Now ‘all this moral cement is dissolved, habits and prejudices are broken and rooted up, nothing being substituted in their place but a quickened self interest, with more extensive views and wider dependencies—but more lax in proportion as they are wider’.
This extensive quickened self-interest is analogous to Carlyle’s demon, the Cash Nexus. Coleridge, too, felt that commerce was becoming an end in itself, and not the means to national health, or justice, or happiness. In 1800 he was writing in The Morning Post that ‘ministerial loans and job work’ created vicious speculation: schemes for internal navigation and rendering waste lands useful had not proceeded with their earlier energy. And the numerous soup establishments, the Committees for the labouring poor were in themselves suspicious phenomena. They were highly honourable to the rich—but to the nation? ‘Is that a genuine prosperity in which healthy labourers are commonly styled “the labouring poor”?’
The conservative Wordsworths grew more afraid of the starving people, the mob. Dorothy complained desperately that ‘so many changes are going on, I consider nothing as stable; and do expect that the sovereign people to whom our rulers bow so obsequiously will not long endure the stamp office and its distributors or the national debt or anything else that now is.’ Wordsworth declared more grandly in 1835 that he had ‘been in the midst of one Revolution in France and recoil with horror from the thought of a second at home. The Radicals and foolish Whigs are driving the nation rapidly to that point that soon alas! it is likely to be found that power will pass from the audacious and wicked to the more audacious and wicked, and so to the still more and more, till military despotism comes in as a quietus.’ (The prose in his letters by this time is dull except on this subject.)
But in their later years both poets retain a concern for the poor, despite Wordsworth’s fear of the mob. Coleridge in 1833, table-talking about machinery, talks about its power to render artefacts cheaper—‘a silk gown is now five times cheaper than in Queen Elizabeth’s time’. But it cannot in the same way, he believes, cheapen ‘the immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man’. The rich are made incalculably better off by machinery than the poor, whose benefits can be summed up as ‘cotton-dresses for maidservants and penny gin to all’.
Wordsworth, gloomy and pessimistic, in 1828 notes that ‘misery and privation are fearfully prevalent’ but argues that it is ‘a thousand to one that the means resorted to to palliate the evil will aggravate it.’ The ‘means resorted to’ include many that did help the poor—Benefit Societies, Savings Banks, Infant Schools, Mechanics’ Institutes—and Wordsworth’s advocation of a ‘wise passiveness’ seems slightly injudicious here. ‘Circumstances have forced this nation to do, by its manufacturers, an undue portion of the dirty and unwholesome work of the globe ….’ But we ‘must bear the sight’ of the results, and ‘endure its pressure, till we have by reflection discovered the cause …’.
Partly, he feared a cheapening and debasing of the things he really cared about through the increase in the power of the people on one hand and commerce on the other. Talking about the sale of the Derwentwater estate in 1832 he expresses a fear that the land may be parcelled out which spreads into his double fear:
If the democratic Spirit be organized in Legislation to the extent now wished for, and aimed at by many, the pecuniary value of every thing in the world of Taste will sink accordingly; and its intellectual estimation will also erelong be proportionately affected. Men will have neither time, tranquillity, or disposition to think about any such thing.
The truth was that Wordsworth, although he spoke truly about being moved by the ‘still, sad music of humanity’, was moved by the permanent truth of the sadness of the human condition more than by particular abuses, which always became for him emblems of permanent truth, if they did move him, as with the leech-gatherer. For him, solitude, contemplation, and deep thought were necessities of life: and the grudging tone in which he refers to ‘democratic legislation’ in the quotation above is related to the famous passages in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where he speaks of new ‘causes … acting with combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor’. These ‘causes’ he describes, in part, as ‘great national events daily taking place’ and ‘accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident’. These complaints—that the pace and uniformity of modern life sap the mind, the will, the necessary sense of being an individual aware of the ‘natural’ rhythms of life—are still with us, and so, in our fear of bureaucracy, of standardization, is Wordsworth’s fear of ‘democracy’. It was Wordsworth who wrote
The world is too much with us: late and soon
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
And knowing what he thought the proper use of ‘our powers’ to be, we can understand the note of pompous irritation in his letter to Lady Beaumont about criticisms of his Poems in Two Volumes:
The things which I have taken, whether from within or without—what have they to do with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on foot or in carriage; with Mr Pitt or Mr Fox, or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster Election … in a word, for I cannot stop to make my way through the hurry of images that present themselves to me, what have they to do with endless talking about things nobody cares anything for except as far as their own vanity is concerned … It is a truth and an awful truth, that there neither is nor can be any genuine enjoyment of Poetry among 19 out of 20 of those persons who live or wish to live in the broad light of the world … This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of Poetry in my sense of the word is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.
But beside Wordsworth’s mistrust of the people and reverence for ‘human nature’ must be set Coleridge’s assertion, in face of the ‘self-adjusting’ economic machine, that persons are not things. The injustices and inhumanity of thinkers and politicians produced from Coleridge prose as great in its way as all but the greatest of Wordsworth’s poems. They tell us, he wrote, that
things are always finding their level: which might be taken as the paraphrase or ironical definition of a storm …. But persons are not things—but man does not find his level. Neither in body nor in soul does man find his level. After a hard and calamitous season, during which the thousand wheels of some vast manufactory had remained silent as a frozen waterfall, be it that plenty has returned and that trade has once more become brisk and stirring: go ask the overseer, and question the parish doctor, whether the workman’s health and temperance, with the staid and respectful manners best taught by the inward dignity of conscious self-support, have found their level again? Alas! I have more than once seen a group of children in Dorsetshire, during the heat of the dog-days, each with its little shoulders up to its ears and its chest pinched inward—the very habit and fixtures as it were that had been impressed on their frames by the former ill-fed, ill-clothed and unfuelled winters. But as with the body, so or still worse with the mind. Nor is the effect confined to the labouring classes, whom by an ominous but too appropriate change in our phraseology we are now accustomed to call the labouring poor!