A household name
Jane Gardam
WORDSWORTH: A LIFE by Juliet Barker Viking, £25, pp. 992 hen Juliet Barker published her biography The Brontës in 1995 she might have rested on her laurels as a Brontd scholar for life. Only five years on she has moved with happy ease, like Mary Hutchin- son, across the Pennines to the Lake Dis- trict to complete this immense biography of Wordsworth.
This book may have been the greater challenge. There were four writing Brontes but their lives were short. There are in effect four writing Wordsworths, for his indecipherable hand and heavily over- scored manuscripts which he was loathe to part with would never have reached the printer without the family toil of his wife, sister, sister-in-law and in time his brilliant, irreverent daughter, Dora. Wordsworth lived to be 80, and never stopped writing.. The result is nearly 1,000 pages of closely annotated, cross-referenced, indexed biog- raphy embracing the lives of crowds of the Wordsworth family and many of their friends. There is the occasional editorial slip — Mary Queen of Scot's, Richard II for Richard III — but nothing slapdash in thought or content and, as in The Brontës, she is uncommonly entertaining. Her own writing responds to landscape and weather with a lovely lyrical style not unlike Dorothy Wordsworth's journal. This is the more Welcome because she has chosen to research particularly the end of Wordsworth's life, usually treated as the afterglow; the time of heavy sonnets, high Toryism, reactionary laureate years, the poet looming like an immovable crag above his Lake District domain. She doesn't dis- regard all this or the curious bees that got caught in the ancient bonnet— the fury at the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act, universal suffrage, the probable merciful- ness of the death penalty — but she has, for the common reader anyway, changed the accepted portrait. First she shows that these years at Rydal Mount (Idle Mount') were not idle and that the mocked house was not bourgeois. It was a necessary move for the ramshackle family, and it was never owned by Wordsworth who was for many years threatened by his mad landlord with evic- tion. `Rydal Mount is a lovely house,' says Barker.
She also shows that Wordsworth was always taking breaks from it. Like so many orphaned children who have had to leave a beloved childhood home, he and his sister Dorothy were restless all their lives, explaining perhaps the habit of almost manic walking which William taught her, bringing her health and rapture. Like him she was to walk all her life, highly eccentric in a woman. She even trudged for hours about the London streets. In the supposed twilight years at Rydal Mount Wordsworth made tours of Ireland, Scotland, the Ionian isles, the Isle of Man, the Low Countries, France, the Rhineland and a last, longed- for tour of Italy which he regretted having left so late as the radiance was now dim. Given his itinerary, the Italian roads and conveyances and his punishing social diary, it is a wonder it didn't kill him. But at over 60 Wordsworth could still climb three mountains in a day and walk on an hour and a half to supper 'without feeling in the least tired'.
He was also forever on the road from Grasmere to London, always complaining that he hated London life, always cheering up when he arrived and staying longer than intended. He needed London society and his publishing life, but also, as Barker points out, London was where he experi- enced two of his mystical visions: as a young man at dawn on Westminster Bridge and much later looking down Fleet Street at St Paul's rising above Ludgate Hill. Lon- don seems to have intensified the tramp in Wordsworth, sending him ever further. Once he decided to take off on a spree down the Rhine with Dora, without men- tioning the fact to his wife at home, and then back again in London decided to return to Grasmere by easy stages, calling on a string of hospitable friends.
How these penniless writers got about! Mutual hospitality between writers is a tra- dition, but in the 19th century how they `If she swims she's a witch, if she drowns she's innocent. There's nothing about synchronised swimming.' tended to stay! One thinks of the women — especially the servantless Wordsworth women — in kitchen and wash-house keep- ing everyone fed and clean and mended. One week led easily into another, for few literary men had bread-and-butter jobs demanding regular attendance (I wish Barker had told us more of the day-to- dayness — if any — of Wordsworth's one paid job as civil servant, the Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland.) And there was no shortage then of country gentlemen with commodious abodes and a respect for men of letters. How lucky the Wordsworths were in their friends, especially the kind Beaumonts and amiable Crabb Robinson. It's good to find that Wordsworth knew it, and made sure they knew that he did.
And let it be said that nobody, ever, could have been more hospitable than the Wordsworths themselves. Even in dank, dark Dove Cottage where the walls were so wet that Dorothy — not her brother, who was pushed out of the way when it came to domestic application — had to line the spare-room walls with newspaper; even at the next dreadful house, Allan Bank, where the fires smoked so much that life was more comfortable in the garden and the family so poor that they had to give up drinking tea, nobody was ever turned away. Not only Coleridge, De Quincey, Lamb, Keats (who found nobody home, left a note and tramped on, perhaps thankfully) but every passing beggar and tinker was given something, even if only a halfpenny.
The tradition, still very Cumbrian, con- tinued into the comparative affluence of Rydal Mount when in one month two to three hundred and in summer up to 800 fans could cross the now marble threshold inlaid with the word 'Salve' (a present from Crabb Robinson) to receive anything from a cup of tea to accommodation for the sea- son. Day-trippers off the new Lakeland railway which Wordsworth deplored: 'Why can't they walk 12 miles from Ambleside? I did,' would stand in a line at his sitting- room window watching the great man at rest on his sofa. When he opened his eyes they all bowed. Queen Adelaide came, one of the few who gave prior warning, and was shown the view. An unknown, dusty poet leaning on his staff was found standing in the drive and was amazed to be brought at once into the presence, shaken warmly by the hand and taken to talk poetry for two hours round the garden. There were huge, almost civic parties. Crowds of locals lis- tened to music and little tables were spread with fruit and flowers. Hordes of children — the Wordsworths loved children — ram- paged about, and Dorothy, exquisite, immaculate Dorothy, once the poet's 'ears and eyes', sat in her little cart, mad as a hare, screaming and shouting. She was a dreadful sight and some wished her dead. She outlived her brother. But nobody ever suggested that she be put in an institution like other mad members of the family. How many depressives and lunatics there were then!
This immensely sociable Wordsworth is a great surprise, but Barker shows that it did not draw on with age. Even as a young poet he liked to walk a track with the possibility of people on it rather than up a lonely mountain. He was always a passionate talk- er and she believes his politics were always more important to him than poetry. Though he grew graver with age he doesn't seem to have grown pompous, and at first he refused the laureateship. He kept his pleasant but 'rough' Cumbrian accent, and always spoke 'as if he were on oath'. Put a flat cap on his head, she says of his 'most like' portrait by Haydon, and it is the head of many a Penrith farmer today, except perhaps for the burning eyes.
This is a domestic biography. The appar- ently tiny events of happy domestic life were at the heart of the Wordsworths' eventual Christian belief. But domestic life can also be the most tragic and Barker, with young children herself, describes the terrible year when the Wordsworths lost two of their children more poignantly and directly than I've read before. She quotes a `brutal' letter Dorothy sent to William, away in London. 'We ... are all in perfect health but poor Catherine died this morn- ing.' The parents were in total desolation. Mary cried for over a year. When later they lost Dora at 24 to tuberculosis, Barker believes that neither parent ever recovered. William became pathetically zealous about his remaining sons, neither with 'a line of poetry in them', Barker says. But it must have been hard for the sons.
If there is a bare patch in the biography it is perhaps Coleridge. Maybe Richard Holmes' passionately sympathetic recent biography has made us all very much Coleridgeans this decade, but I feel Barker keeps her distance. We see how he `shattered' the Wordsworths, his opium- eating, drinking, infidelity, sponging and hypochondria, but maybe not his pain, and the hell of his addiction. The importance of the bright thread of his poetry running through Wordsworth's life, the lyricism of their young lives all together at Nether Stowey is in the background only. I missed his lumbering presence. Hartley Coleridge is there, however, the quaint, near-genius son with his short legs and bushy beard, the baby they had all adored. Wordsworth wept when he died, and he is buried with the Wordsworth family.
The women are good. Mary comes out calm, wise and forgiving and William's let- ters to her after years of marriage glow with love. There's an astringent streak. After a gruelling editing session she says to him, 'I really think that you are cleverer than ever' and he rushes out to tell some- one, for 'it is not a usual thing for her to say'. Coleridge's Asra, Sara Hutchinson, remains an enigma. Plain, intellectual, cir- cumspect, good, 'slipping away' in death when everyone is busy, she allowed herself one fierce sentence in Coleridge's defence, but we still don't really know her feelings about him. Mrs Coleridge seems to have been devoted to her in a way few wives are devoted to their husband's object of pas- sion. Maybe she was simply cold. And the clearest portrait is Dora — Dora who had all the good looks of the family, all the spark her brothers lacked. She's a sad girl, anorexic, hypochondriac, far too close to her father, suffering his jealousy when she married his old friend Quillinin, the Irish widower, who sounds nice enough, but Dora deserved better. Dora deserved to escape.
Not even this biography can be without its hazy areas and Barker has acknowl- edged several and drawn the curtain back on a few. She seems to have disovered the removal of some pages from Dorothy's journal and suggests a rather tame reason for it. She does not attempt to answer the old conundrum of Wordsworth leaving his French mistress eight months pregnant, to dawdle home via Paris and the French Revolution with anything new. She is good on the Wordsworth wedding ring which has lately been found to have been bought in the Low Countries, which brother and sis- ter passed through en route to Wordsworth's marriage in Yorkshire; the ring which Wordsworth momentarily slipped on Dorothy's finger in, Barker says, `an oddly repellent gesture'. And she is interesting about the delivery of the Wordsworths' first child, large and healthy after an eight-month pregnancy. One feels it should have been Dorothy's!
But rightly and seriously, thank good- ness, she keeps off wedding rings and wronged women and brings us very close to the family we all know and who seem much nearer to us now than, for instance, Jane Austen's contemporary family. More importantly she brings us the poet whose poems have become 'every line a quota- tion' and who posthumously, was to publish in The Prelude a philosophy that has changed our views on poetry, childhood and time.
'I'm afraid he wants his ashes trodden into your stair-carpet.'
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