The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge
The reunion between Dorothy and her brothers in 1787 was all too brief. After a few weeks the young family was once again dispersed: William to Cambridge,* her eldest brother Richard to London where he would train as a lawyer, her two younger brothers back to school in Hawkshead. Dorothy remained unhappily with her grandparents in Penrith until William returned from university the following summer. Later that year Dorothy’s uncle, the Reverend William Cookson, married and took up a living in East Anglia. It was decided that Dorothy, by now sixteen, should accompany her uncle and aunt to the Norfolk village of Forncett St Peter, and live with them there. She would remain at the Forncett rectory for five years, helping her aunt with her burgeoning family and running a little school. It was a lonely life for Dorothy, isolated from the friends she had grown up alongside in Yorkshire. The Cooksons did not share her pursuits and pleasures, though they treated her kindly and affectionately. But Forncett was conveniently close to Cambridge,† and William was able to visit her there in the holidays.
There was a special sympathy between these two. Sensitive, passionate and uninhibited, Dorothy acted as a lightning rod for her more reserved brother, showing him flashes of feeling. ‘I have thought of you perpetually,’ he wrote to her while on his walking tour in the Alps, ‘and never have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness but I have almost instantly wished that you could for a moment be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it.’31 Wordsworth spent the Christmas vacation before his finals at Forncett; every morning brother and sister would walk in the garden for two hours, pacing backwards and forwards on the gravel arm in arm, even when the keenest north wind was whistling among the trees, and every evening they would walk another two hours or so, engaged in ‘long, long conversations’.
‘I never thought of the cold when he was with me,’ wrote Dorothy to Jane Pollard, to whom she confessed that though she was fond of all her brothers, William was her favourite. In comparison to their youngest brother Christopher (now also at Cambridge), while each was ‘steady and sincere in his attachments’, William was more ardent, with ‘a sort of violence of affection’ towards those whom he loved, like Dorothy, manifest in ‘a thousand almost imperceptible attentions’ to her wishes daily, ‘a sort of restless watchfulness which I know not how to describe, a tenderness that never sleeps, and at the same time such a delicacy of manners as I have observed in few men’. Looking back at the time William was with her at Forncett, Dorothy recalled how ‘he was never tired of comforting his sister, he never left her in anger, he always met her with joy, he preferred her society to every other pleasure, or rather when we were so happy as to be within each other’s reach he had no pleasure when we were compelled to be divided’.32
‘I am sure you would be pleased with him,’ she told Jane Pollard; ‘he is certainly very agreeable in his manners and he is so amiable, so good, so fond of his Sister! Oh Jane the last time we were together he won my affection to a degree which I cannot describe; his Attentions to me were such as the most insensible of mortals must have been touched with, there was no Pleasure that he would not have given up with joy for half an hour’s conversation with me.’33 Dorothy wanted her best female friend to think well of her ‘dearest male friend’, but she warned Jane not to expect too much, at least not at the beginning:
In the first place you must be with him more than once before he will be perfectly easy in conversation; in the second place his person is not in his favour, at least I should think not; but I soon ceased to discover this, nay I almost thought that the opinion which I first formed was erroneous. He is however, certainly rather plain than otherwise, has an extremely thoughtful countenance, but when he speaks it is often lighted up with a smile which I think very pleasing …34
The young Wordsworth was not handsome, but not ugly either: slightly taller than the average, and gaunt, with a solemn manner that occasionally collapsed in quiet mirth. His face was dominated by a prominent straight nose, and deep furrows that ran vertically up both cheeks; his eyes were serious, lit by the odd twinkle; his mouth was broad, with full lips; his short fine hair was already beginning to recede.
Dorothy seems to have regarded herself as plain too; she describes herself to Jane Pollard as being without accomplishments, ‘your old friend Dolly Wordsworth’, with ‘nothing to recommend me to your regard but a warm honest and affectionate heart’.35 At twenty she confessed that ‘no man I have seen has appeared to regard me with any degree of partiality; nor has any one gained my affections’.36 Nor was it likely that a dependent young woman with no parents and no inheritance would have found a suitor, unless she was remarkably pretty. For such women, the prospects were bleak: genteel poverty at best* – unless, as often happened, she found a home with a male relative.
Another long period of separation followed Wordsworth’s departure from Forncett early in 1791. Dorothy consoled herself by anticipating ‘the day of my felicity, the day in which I am once more to find a home under the same roof with my brother’. There seemed no doubt in her mind that the day would come. While she still believed that William would take holy orders, she imagined their ‘little parsonage’: closing the shutters in the evening, setting out the tea table, brightening the fire. She pictured the scene when Jane Pollard would come to stay: ‘When our refreshment is ended I produce our work, and William brings his book to our table and contributes at once to our instruction and amusement, and at intervals we lay aside the book and each hazard our observations upon what has been read without the fear of ridicule or censure … Oh Jane! With such romantic dreams as these I amuse my fancy during many an hour which would otherwise pass heavily along.’37
This idyll survived the revelation that Wordsworth had fathered a child in France – though the ‘little parsonage’ became ‘our little cottage’. One immediate effect, however, was that Wordsworth was no longer welcome at Forncett. His uncle Cookson was already disappointed by his clever nephew’s failure to follow the path he had laid, via a Cambridge Fellowship into the Church. From his point of view, Wordsworth had thrown away an excellent opportunity. No doubt he had heard something of Wordsworth’s radical opinions. Early in 1792 Cookson had been appointed Canon of Windsor, a post that brought him into regular contact with the royal family. It must have been embarrassing for him to be connected to a young man who professed republicanism. This latest news decided him.38* A man who had fathered an illegitimate child – a French, Catholic child – could not be considered respectable company for his wife, and must be an unsuitable influence on Dorothy.
So matters stood after Wordsworth’s return from France. He was excluded from Forncett; while Dorothy could not leave Forncett without her uncle’s permission. In the middle of the year 1793, however, a new possibility opened. Since Dorothy’s departure from Halifax, Elizabeth Threlkeld had become Mrs William Rawson; now she and her husband invited Dorothy to come and stay whenever she was free to do so. Dorothy was fond of Mrs Rawson, who in caring for her from the age of six until sixteen had treated her like a daughter, and she very much wanted to pay another visit to the place where she had spent much of her childhood – but she also had a secret reason for accepting the invitation. The Rawsons had seen Wordsworth in London, and had pressed him too to visit them next time he was in the north. Dorothy knew that her uncle Cookson might withhold his permission for her visit to Halifax if he suspected that she might meet her brother there. She and William therefore made a clandestine arrangement to visit the Rawsons at the same time, as if by accident. It was difficult to co-ordinate, because Dorothy could not travel until she could find an escort to chaperone her. Wordsworth had arrived in north Wales, poised to make the short onward journey to Halifax, towards the end of August – but then he had to wait for Dorothy. It would be midwinter before they met. And what he did for the remainder of the year is a mystery.
The next glimpse we have of Wordsworth is at Christmas time, when he is staying with one of his uncles in Whitehaven, on the Cumbrian coast. Again, there is a tantalising clue to suggest what he might have been doing in the interim. In a memoir written in 1867 and published posthumously in his Reminiscences (1881), Thomas Carlyle reported a conversation with Wordsworth held around 1840, a few years after the publication of Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution. Wordsworth apparently told Carlyle that he had witnessed the execution of the journalist Gorsas – who was guillotined on 7 October 1793. Might he really have been in Paris then? Could he have tried to reach the Loire, to see Annette and his infant daughter? Did he plan to marry Annette, as she hoped he might?
It seems unlikely. For one thing, it clashed with his secret plan to meet Dorothy in Halifax. At last an opportunity for them to meet had presented itself: an opportunity that might be lost if he were not there to take it. Then there were numerous practical difficulties Wordsworth would have needed to overcome, including the expense. Also, it was becoming much more dangerous; between 11 and 15 October 1793 all Englishmen remaining in Paris – even Tom Paine – were arrested and imprisoned. After this there would be no further possibility of going to France while the war persisted. Heads were rolling. Gorsas was the first deputy sent to the scaffold; Brissot and many of the remaining Girondin deputies would follow at the end of the month. Marie Antoinette, too, was guillotined on 16 October, a deed that provoked horror throughout Europe. An order went out from the Convention to repress counter-revolution ferociously: ‘Terror will be the order of the day!’ In Lyons, for example, men and women were forced to dig ditches and then stand beside them under cannon fire until they tumbled into their own mass graves. Meanwhile the Atlantic coast was in upheaval. Wordsworth believed – mistakenly, as it turned out – that his friend Beaupuy had been killed while fighting the Vendée rebels.
Even so, it is hard to dismiss altogether the possibility that Wordsworth might have made a visit to France at this time. As a historian of the French Revolution, Carlyle had been impressed by Wordsworth’s strong testimony to the ‘ominous feeling’ which Gorsas’s execution ‘had produced in everybody’, and quoted words that Wordsworth said (or thought) at the time: ‘Where will it end, when you have set an example in this kind?’ In all his reading Carlyle had not before found any trace of the public emotion excited by Gorsas’s death, and he concluded, ‘Wordsworth might be taken as a true supplement to my book, on this small point.’ He seemed convinced that Wordsworth had indeed been there to see Gorsas die. And the implication that some have drawn from Wordsworth’s reported comment is that this must have been the moment when he lost faith in the Revolution.
Any hypothesis that rests on Carlyle’s Reminiscences has to take into account the fact that he was an old man when he wrote the memoir, shattered by the sudden death of his wife, and that he was recalling a conversation that had taken place nearly thirty years before, with another old man who was reminiscing about events that would have happened almost half a century before that. A certain degree of scepticism is legitimate, especially as Carlyle purports to quote from Wordsworth verbatim.
Apart from Carlyle’s report, there is nothing of substance to support the speculation that Wordsworth returned to France in the autumn of 1793. In a volume in Wordsworth’s library there is a marginal note where Gorsas is mentioned: ‘I knew this man. W.W.’ It is easy to imagine how Wordsworth might have known Gorsas while he was staying in Paris the previous winter; much harder to imagine how he could have got to know him immediately before his execution, while he was in hiding and then in prison. But the proof that Wordsworth had known Gorsas at some stage makes Carlyle’s story a little more credible. For those who want to make a case for Wordsworth’s visit to France at this time there is yet another sliver of evidence, in the form of a third-hand account published in 1884 of a meeting in Paris between Wordsworth and ‘an old republican called Bailey’ – but the story is so garbled and contradictory as to be worthless.
Nor is there any reference in The Prelude to another visit to France. It is plausible that Wordsworth might have wanted to hide any trace of a visit to Annette; but that would not explain why he should conceal a visit to Paris. The horror of witnessing the guillotine in action – in the execution of a man he knew – would have left a deep impression on him: an impression which the poet would surely have wanted to describe in the poem on the growth of his own mind, of which such impressions form the essence.
Perhaps Wordsworth did return to Paris in the autumn of 1793. It is not impossible. But the evidence is too flimsy to form conclusions from it – about Wordsworth’s faith in the Revolution, his feelings for Annette Vallon, or anything else.39
By the middle of February 1794 Wordsworth was staying with the Rawsons in Halifax, together with Dorothy. One can be confident that their reunion was a very happy one. And it was extended when William Calvert offered Wordsworth the use of Windy Brow, a farmhouse near Keswick, on a steep bank above the River Greta. The surrounding scenery was magnificent: there were views from a terrace above the house of the whole vale of Keswick, Derwent Water in one direction and Bassenthwaite in the other, with mountains towering all around. Dorothy was so happy to be there with her brother, living in frugal simplicity, that she prolonged her stay from a planned few days to several weeks.
To reach Windy Brow they travelled by coach from Halifax to Kendal, then continued on foot, a two-day ramble much disapproved of by another of their aunts, who sent Dorothy a letter of censure to which Dorothy wrote a spirited reply: ‘So far from considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post-chaise – but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings.’ Her aunt had supposed that Dorothy was living in ‘an unprotected situation’. ‘I consider the character and virtues of my brother as a sufficient protection,’ Dorothy declared defiantly. She defended her decision to prolong her stay at Windy Brow: ‘I am now twenty-two years of age,’ she pointed out, ‘and such have been the circumstances of my life that I may be said to have enjoyed his company only for a very few months. An opportunity now presents itself of obtaining this satisfaction, an opportunity which I could not see pass from me without unspeakable pain. Besides I not only derive much pleasure but much improvement from my brother’s society. I have regained all the knowledge I had of the French language some years ago, and have added considerably to it, and I have now begun reading Italian …’40
The walk itself would remain long in the memory of both. Its significance increased as the years passed. This was a return to the country of their childhood – but it also provided a glimpse of their future together, passing through places that would become sacred to them. ‘I walked with my brother at my side, from Kendal to Grasmere, eighteen miles, and afterwards from Grasmere to Keswick, fifteen miles, through the most delightful country that was ever seen.’41 It was early April when they set out, a day of mixed sun and showers. At their first stop, Staveley, they drank a basin of milk at a public house, and Dorothy washed her feet in a brook, afterwards putting on a pair of silk stockings at her brother’s recommendation. A little further on they reached Windermere, and continued north on the road that runs along the east bank of the lake to Ambleside. They picnicked beside a beck below Wansfell. Towards sunset, as they approached Grasmere, they left the road and followed the footpath along the south side of Rydal Water. The slanting yellow light cast deep shadows before the surrounding mountains.
* Only days before he was condemned in the name of George III, Paine, as a deputy in the Convention, had been sitting in judgement on the former French King.
* One of the now-defunct Inns of Chancery, then attached to Grays Inn. The building still stands on High Holborn.
* In fact Watson had not gone over to the other side. On 27 January 1795, for example, he was the only Bishop to vote against the continuance of the war with France, arguing in the House of Lords that there was no connection between ‘the establishment of a Republic in France, and the subversion of the English constitution’
* Wakefield likened the possibility of a restoration of the monarchy in France to a dog returning to its vomit, a phrase Wordsworth would later use to characterise the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France in 1804. See pages 214n and 377.
† Its full title was Peace and Union recommended to the associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans.
* A mixture of fortified wine and hot water, sweetened and flavoured.
* Three of Coleridge’s brothers became soldiers, one became a doctor, one a clergyman, and two became schoolmasters
* Coleridge believed that he had succumbed to rheumatic fever, which would affect him periodically from this moment on; but the autopsy performed after his death does not support this diagnosis.
* Alcoholic tincture of opium, a reddish-brown liquid, lighter or darker according to strength. De Quincey kept his in a decanter, where it was sometimes mistaken for port by the unwary.16
* In 1792 William Wilberforce had introduced to Parliament a Bill to abolish the slave trade. It was passed by the House of Commons; but lacking government support, it was rejected by the Lords.
* An intimate reference.
* Her brother Paul was implicated in a plot to assassinate a prominent Jacobin and forced to go into hiding.
* For example, in the Reverend William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (1782), which Wordsworth carried with him on his return to the Wye Valley with Dorothy in 1798.
* William was sent back with his younger brothers to Hawkshead in midsummer, though Dorothy had hoped that he might be permitted to stay with her until he went up to Cambridge in late October
† Dorothy and the Cooksons called on William there en route to their new home.
* An obvious comparison is Jane Fairfax’s situation at the outset of Emma.
* Wordsworth’s fathering of an illegitimate child seems not to have been a secret within the immediate family, nor was it kept from intimate friends such as Jane Pollard, though it remained hidden from the public until Annette’s letters were discovered in the twentieth century.
3 IDEALISM
‘I am studying such a book!’ gushed Robert Southey, a nineteen-year-old Oxford undergraduate, in a letter to a former schoolmate on 22 November 1793.1 He was reading William Godwin’s enormously influential An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, published in two volumes earlier in the year, which he had borrowed from the Bristol Library. Southey’s rapturous reaction typified that of thousands of English radicals. For Henry Crabb Robinson, for example, then a teenage articled clerk, Political Justice ‘made me feel more generously’, that the good of the community was his sole duty. Godwin, a former dissenting minister and self-taught philosopher, offered a solution to the problems of these troubling times. Humanity was perfectible, or at least susceptible to permanent improvement. Man was essentially a rational creature; since reason taught benevolence, it followed that men were capable of living in harmony without laws or institutions. In modern terms, Godwin was an anarchist. Society was nothing more than an aggregation of individuals. ‘Efforts for improvement of society must therefore be aimed at the improvement of each individual in it. Until each individual is made more rational, and therefore more moral, social institutions will not become more just.’ Vice resulted from injustice – but this injustice could be overcome only by changing individuals. Godwin rejected all forms of association, including organised political agitation for social reform.
Southey was excited by this new philosophy, which seemed to overturn conventional wisdom. ‘We are born in sin and the children of wrath – says the catechism. It is absolutely false. Sin is artificial – it is the monstrous offspring of government and property. The origin of both was in injustice.’ In a rhetorical flourish, Southey asked any man of feeling to survey the lobby at the theatres or to look at the courtesans on the streets of London. Society was manifestly depraved, he wrote primly. It was innately unjust; by aggrandising the few it oppressed the many. ‘Would man thieve did not want tempt him? Poverty is the nurse of vice where she is dogged by disgrace.’ He did not ask much for himself. ‘Every day’s experience shews me how little Man wants, and every hours reflection now tends to fix my wishes on the grave’ (he was still very young). But ‘whilst Reason keeps the balance I dare live’.2
He rejected the conventional title ‘esquire’. A man who deplored social distinctions could obviously have no truck with monarchy – thus Southey repeatedly declared himself to be a republican, even though to do so publicly might damage his prospects: ‘Perish every hope of life rather than that I should forfeit my integrity.’ He had been swept up in the first wave of enthusiasm for the Revolution; it appeared to him as if the human race was being washed clean. Like Wordsworth, he had fantasised about fighting on the frontier to defend the young Republic. Though subsequently alarmed by the September Massacres and repelled by the execution of the Queen, he remained a determined radical: ‘I can condemn the crimes of the French & yet be a Republican.’3
Even before he discovered Godwin, Southey had imagined an ideal community, an island populated by philosophers. There society could begin anew, without rules or gradations. His imagination was fired by reports of the tropical idyll that had lured the crew of the Bounty into mutiny;* Tahiti had many inducements, he insisted, ‘independant [sic] of its women’ – not only for the sailor, but for the philosopher too. Perhaps Southey was taken with the example of Fletcher Christian, a young rebel against tyrannical authority. Another of his utopian visions was of an ideal city, Southeyopolis. In a letter describing his grandiose scheme for Southeyopolis, Southey felt it necessary to protest that he had not been drinking.4
Increasingly, Southey began to talk of emigration to America.5 There, in a state of nature, he would find contentment. To the democratic mind there was something attractive in the idea of clearing one’s own land and living in a cottage one had built oneself. As the political outlook in Britain became bleaker, America began to look more attractive. The 1790s saw a new wave of emigrants to America,* many of them dissenters depressed by repeated failure to reform the laws that discriminated against them. Early in 1794 Joseph Priestley decided that he too had had enough of England and sailed across the Atlantic, where he settled in Pennsylvania, on the banks of Susquehanna River.
‘I have been doing nothing and still continue to be doing nothing,’ Wordsworth had admitted to his undergraduate friend William Mathews while he and Dorothy were staying with the Rawsons; ‘what is to become of me I know not.’ He could not face either of the two careers proposed to him, the law or the Church.6 It was now more than three years since he had left Cambridge, and he was still drifting from place to place. His only obvious achievement in all this time had been to publish two poems, and though he had another (inspired by his walk across Salisbury Plain) ready for the press, the ‘unmerited contempt’ with which those had been treated by some of the periodicals made him reluctant to publish anything further unless he could hope to ‘derive from it some pecuniary recompense’.7 With no income, he was living as modestly as possible, relying on the hospitality of relatives and friends and the occasional subvention from his elder brother, who controlled what meagre resources remained to the young family.