RADICAL WORDSWORTH EB

Jonathan Bate

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008167455
• eBook ISBN: 9780008167431
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020

'Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact' Financial Times

'Richly repays reading … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much' Sunday Times

A dazzling new biography of Wordsworth's radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth.

William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called 'a sort of national property'. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment, and about the purpose of poetry.

He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution, had a love affair and an illegitimate child, before witnessing horrific violence in Paris. His friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the Romantic movement. As he retreated from radical politics and into an imaginative world within, his influence would endure as he shaped the ideas of thinkers, writers and activists throughout the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States. This wonderful book opens what Wordsworth called 'the hiding places of my power'.

W. H. Auden once wrote that 'Poetry makes nothing happen'. He was wrong. Wordsworth's poetry changed the world. Award-winning biographer and critic Jonathan Bate tells the story of how it happened.

PART ONE

1770–1806:
BLISS WAS IT IN THAT DAWN TO BE ALIVE

Mr Wordsworth’s genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age

(William Hazlitt)

2

A VOICE THAT FLOWED ALONG MY DREAMS

The poem he read to Coleridge on those winter nights in Sir George Beaumont’s farmhouse had its origin some eight years earlier. Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and Coleridge had gone to Germany, ostensibly to learn the language. Coleridge had been urging Wordsworth to write a philosophical epic. Wordsworth was meditating upon his poetic vocation. The question of his destiny led him to think of his origins, and that was where he began:

Was it for this

That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved

To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,

And from his alder shades and rocky falls,

And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice

That flowed along my dreams?[1]

Wordsworthian questions may convey a sense of doubt and hesitation, a sense of wonder and surprise, or sometimes both at once. Was it for this? Negatively: for being stuck in Germany, far from home, suffering from writer’s block on a project that I don’t really believe in, but that I cannot give up on because Coleridge believes that it is my destiny to be the greatest philosophical poet of the age, the true successor to John Milton. Positively: perhaps it was for this, the act of writing, the very thing that I am writing now, that I was born. A poetic vision that would indeed become philosophical, but that begins in memory, in home, in nature and in childhood.

A vision that begins with the river Derwent flowing beside the garden wall of the house in Cockermouth where he was born. With the musical murmur of that river. If you are lucky enough to be born beside a river – especially in a world without the hum of traffic and electricity, let alone the white noise of modern communications – the sound of its water will be a constant under-presence to your childhood, heard below the bedtime lullabies, through the drift into sleep and on into your dreams. The river speaks and asks the nascent poet to respond in lines that will flow in blank verse across the line endings: ‘Was it for this / That’, ‘loved / To blend’, ‘a voice / That flowed’. The river Derwent was his first muse.

His birthplace, now owned by the National Trust, is elegant and imposing, Georgian architecture at its best, bathed in light by way of eight large sashed windows on the lower floor and nine on the upper. There were spacious, wood-panelled rooms and ample quarters for family servants. The children’s bedroom was at the back of the house, looking out on the well-stocked garden that led down to a terraced path by the Derwent. When you open the window, you hear the water. There is a rocky patch on the bed of the river as it flows past the house, causing the water to eddy and to murmur a little louder.

A new build in an old community, this was, and still is, the most handsome dwelling on the main street of Cockermouth, an ancient market town on the north-west fringe of the English Lake District, dominated by a partially ruined Norman castle. The house belonged to a man said to be the richest landowner in England: Sir James Lowther. He was variously known as ‘Wicked Jimmy’, ‘the Bad Earl’, the ‘Tyrant of the North’ and ‘Jimmy Grasp-all, Earl of Toadstool’. As well as his rural estates, he owned whole towns, coal mines and the harbour at Whitehaven, the second-busiest port in the land and an engine room of the northern economy. He was master of all he surveyed, exercising control over nine seats in Parliament.

Wordsworth’s grandfather Richard had been law-agent for Lowther’s properties and dealings in Westmorland until Richard’s death in 1760. Wordsworth’s father John followed in the family footsteps, training in the law and then entering the service of the Lowthers. In 1764, John Wordsworth was made responsible for their estates in Cumberland (the Lake District is now in ‘Cumbria’, but it was then two counties, Westmorland on the Pennine side, Cumberland towards the sea). Lowther installed his agent in the impressive house on Cockermouth high street so that everybody would know that his man was someone to be reckoned with.

Eighteenth-century England was a place where property was power. Without it, you couldn’t even vote. If you committed a crime against property – poaching, trespass, petty theft – your punishment would be severe. Most of the English land was owned by the all-powerful families of the aristocracy and the gentry, though with some important exceptions, among them the remoter parts of the Lake District. The traditional role for the steward and law-agent of a great landowner was to oversee the estates, collect rents and handle disputes. But John Wordsworth was also tasked with the work of ensuring that eligible voters turned out to support the Lowther interest at election time. To maintain the family’s supremacy in the region, it was necessary to keep all those parliamentary boroughs in their pocket. Some votes were openly bought, but most were ‘canvassed’ by way of the supply of free alcohol. The biggest election expense was the reimbursement of innkeepers, who provided drinks on the house through the several days of polling, in return for the assurance of a vote for their patron. Following the 1774 election, John Wordsworth had to settle a bill just a few shillings short of £200, for ‘Victuals and Liquor consumed during the course of the poll’.[2] That is about £30,000 or $40,000 in today’s money.

The role of Lowther’s agent did not make for popularity. When John Wordsworth’s only daughter was a teenager, she complained that ‘it is indeed mortifying to my Brothers and me to find that amongst all those who visited at my father’s house he had not one real friend’.[3] The only callers were there on business or trying to gain influence with Lowther. One would have expected Mr Wordsworth to be well remunerated for such work. He was not. The house came rent-free, but he had no formal contract or salary. Instead, he was rewarded with interests of his own, such as the tolls on cattle gates and rents on small parcels of land. His financial dependence on his master would become a huge problem for his children.

The year after arriving in Cockermouth, John Wordsworth, now twenty-five, married eighteen-year-old Ann Cookson, daughter of a linendraper from another market town, Penrith, in the east of Cumberland. Within six years, there were five children: firstborn son Richard, the responsible one, destined to become a lawyer like his father; William, born two years later, on 7 April 1770, a temperamental child, the only one his mother ever worried about; Dorothy, the only daughter, born on Christmas Day of 1771; the following December, John, adored by William and Dorothy, ‘from his earliest infancy of most lonely and retired habits’, and therefore known by his father as ‘Ibex’, after ‘the shyest of all the beasts’;[4] then finally, in 1774, Christopher, the scholarly one, who would rise to the supreme position in the academic world, master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The woman’s role was to nurture her children in the Christian faith. At Easter, they would troop to church to say their catechism, dressed in fresh clothes. One of William’s few memories of his mother had her pinning to his breast a nosegay of flowers that she had picked and bound for the occasion. With her husband away from home, riding the county on Lowther business, Ann often sent the children to relatives for a change of air. John’s elder brother, Richard, was Collector of Customs in the port of Whitehaven. On their first sight of the sea, little Dorothy wept. In old age, William would say that this was the first sign of her remarkable ‘sensibility’.[5] On the beach, they picked up shells and took them back to Cockermouth, holding the hollows to their ear and hearing the sound of the sea.

The children also made long visits to Penrith, staying above the linen shop with their mother’s parents, whom they found grumpy and critical. This encouraged a rebellious streak in William. He had a temper. Once, he recalled, he was so angry at being told off for some trivial offence that he went up to his grandparents’ attic and picked up one of the swords that he knew were kept there, with the intention of killing himself. On another occasion, he and his older brother Richard were whipping their spinning tops on the bare boards of the drawing-room floor. The walls were hung round with family portraits. ‘Dare you strike your whip through that old lady’s petticoat?’ asked William. ‘No, I won’t,’ was goody-goody Richard’s inevitable reply. ‘Then,’ said William, launching his whip, ‘here goes.’[6]

William was christened and Dorothy baptized at the same time.[7] They became inseparable. Their favourite place was the terrace by the river at the bottom of the garden, which commanded a fine view of Cockermouth Castle and the hills beyond. Sparrows built their nests in the closely clipped privet and rose hedge that covered the terrace wall. Tearaway William chased butterflies, while sensitive Dorothy feared to brush the dust from their wings.[8]

Standing at the confluence of the river Cocker and the Derwent, the town has always been prone to flooding: in 2009, Wordsworth’s birthplace was temporarily inundated by his beloved river. His own earliest memory, he claimed, was of total immersion in the Derwent’s crystal water. The first self-image in the first draft of his autobiographical poem is of a naked four-year-old boy making ‘one long bathing of a summer’s day’, basking in the sun, plunging into the stream. And then, when the rain comes pouring down, as sooner or later (usually sooner) it always does in the Lake District, standing alone like ‘a naked savage’ framed against crag, hill, wood and ‘distant Skiddaw’s lofty height’.[9]

He would always be pulled back to these mountains, rivers and lakes. But he was also born with the restless spirit of a wanderer. From an early age, his eye would be drawn to a road that led over the hill above the town and on into an unknown distance. Few things, he claims, pleased him more than a ‘public road’, a sight that

Hath wrought on my imagination since the morn

Of childhood, when a disappearing line,

One daily present to my eyes, that crossed

The naked summit of a far-off hill

Beyond the limits that my feet had trod,

Was like an invitation into space

Boundless.[10]

Wordsworth loved space. He did not want to be bound. At least in retrospect, he imagined himself being called from his home to a vagrant life. He loved nothing more than to walk. Thomas De Quincey, one of his disciples, reckoned that in the course of his life Wordsworth walked some 175,000 miles. The on-the-road conversation with a beggar, a discharged soldier, a dispossessed woman, an impoverished leech gatherer, a shepherd bearing the last of his flock: this would become a hallmark of his poetry.

*

William and Dorothy periodically attended a ‘dame school’ (kindergarten) in Penrith, where among the fellow pupils was Mary Hutchinson, his future wife, and her sister Sara. At the age of six, William entered the grammar school in Cockermouth. The master spent half a year trying fruitlessly to teach him Latin. But then Wordsworth was educated into strong feeling by harsh experience. Nearly all his greatest poetry is pervaded by a feeling of loss: the loss of childhood, of freedom, of the unmediated relationship with nature symbolized by the four-year-old child plunging naked into the Derwent. For a psychological explanation of this, we need look no further than a day one month before his eighth birthday.

His mother returned from a visit to friends in London. She had been accommodated in the so-called ‘best bedroom’, that is to say a guest room reserved for special occasions and therefore not regularly aired. The bed was damp. She caught a cold, which turned to a ‘decline’, probably pneumonia. Soon after her return to her parents’ house in Penrith, she died. The seven-year-old William’s ‘last impression’ of his mother was ‘a glimpse of her on passing the door of her bedroom during her last illness, when she was reclining in her easy chair’.[11] She was buried at Penrith on 11 March 1778.

He readily admitted that he remembered very little of his mother, yet he firmly believed that it was from her that he learned his love of nature. ‘Blest the infant babe’, he wrote, as he embarked on his project to use his ‘best conjectures’ to ‘trace / The progress of our being’: the baby nursed in its mother’s arms or sleeping on its mother’s breast is blessed because it is learning the experience of sympathy, the force of love. It is through the bond with our mothers in our infancy that we first claim ‘manifest kindred’ with a soul other than our own. As the baby at the breast gazes into the mother’s eye, it has its first experience of feeling. The reciprocal exchange of ‘passion’ is like an ‘awakening breeze’ that in time will extend its force and bind us to our natural surroundings, irradiating and exalting ‘All objects through all intercourse of sense’:

Along his infant veins are interfused

The gravitation and the filial bond

Of Nature that connect him with the world.[12]

The baby feels safe when ‘by intercourse of touch’ it holds ‘mute dialogues’ with the ‘mother...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Prelude
• Part One: 1770–1806: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
• Excursion
• Part Two: 1807–1850: Wordsworth’s healing power
• Retrospect
• Picture Section
• Chronology
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Footnote
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Jonathan Bate
• About the Publisher