The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels. Adam Nicolson
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tops and evenings in the lush richness of the midsummer combes, some kind of change could be wrought in the soul of England.
This was the cluster of ideas-in-a-place to which Coleridge brought Wordsworth and Dorothy in early July 1797. Their arrival was only one part of his more general gathering of friends and allies. It was not to be a lonely year. He had Poole there already. Soon to come was Charles Lamb, his great and brilliant boyhood friend from his school days at Christ’s Hospital in London. Also walking down from London was a man he knew only by correspondence, John Thelwall, famous across England for his radical lectures, his still more famous treason trial of 1794, at which he had been acquitted, and his continuing harassment and persecution by the spy system of the Home Office and its attendant bullies. There was a chance that Robert Southey, Sara Coleridge’s brother-in-law, would also come, with her sister Edith. Coleridge had broken with Southey, but it was to him that he was continuing to write his most intellectualised of letters. The Wedgwood brothers, the Pinneys, his Bristol publisher John Cottle, his unstable pupil and protégé Charles Lloyd – all were to be swept into the Coleridgean embrace. Nether Stowey in his mind was to be a nest of nightingales, singing for the future.
Just how the Wordsworths, the Coleridges, Lamb, Hartley, Nanny and Mrs Rich were crowded into the tiny house, with the prospect of all these others in the offing, is difficult to imagine. At least there was the outside, the vegetable patch and orchard with the leaning tree, the gate and lane at the back leading to Tom Poole’s house and garden. There Poole had built a rustic summer house made of slabs of oak bark, with a jasmine trained over them, all under the shade of a lime tree – nothing more richly or thickly honey-scented in early summer – and with four big elms ballooning above them. Beyond that were the hills and the combes. The Quantocks beckoned them that July. It scarcely rained, just over an inch in the whole month, with one dry day succeeding another. The thermometer stood above seventy degrees Fahrenheit on more than twenty of those July afternoons, occasionally climbing into the eighties, and with hot nights to follow.
It was a recipe for English summer freedom. Sometimes the walks were solitary, Wordsworth and Dorothy exploring the world Coleridge had brought them to, Coleridge going out on his own, but often all of them went, six or seven of them heading out into the hills. There was nothing inherently odd about this kind of walking. As William Holland repeatedly described, everybody walked, and not only the poor who had no choice. Errand boys did indeed ‘walk from place to place on messages’, and one man walked all the way from London to Over Stowey to get a marriage licence, but gentry neighbours also walked to visit each other, or to have tea, to give people news or to deliver the newspaper whose subscription they shared, up the hill to look at the ships in the Bristol Channel with the spying glass, for picnics, with children to look for birds’ nests, in the dusk or the early morning, or ‘after supper by a fine moonlight’. Husbands and wives, children and young women all went walking on the lanes and paths of the parish.
Walking could be preferable ‘to the jogging of the cart’, or a pleasure in itself: ‘After dinner the young nymphs took a walk … I walked home by the light of the good moon.’ A ‘trudge’ in the snow, or at night with a lantern, or in the rain with an umbrella, were all part of everyday life. In bad weather the women wore pattens, high-soled wooden overshoes to keep the ordinary shoes dry and above the mud, and men heavy boots.
And so, soon after their arrival, the Wordsworths sauntered off on their own. Coleridge had judged them right. Dorothy suddenly expanded into all-enveloping enthusiasm for a country that felt like a mild version of their childhood mountains, even with woods that seemed to match those that had belonged to the Earl of Lonsdale, who had cheated them of their inheritance for so long:
… There is everything here; sea, woods wild as fancy ever painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romantic; and William and I, in a wander by ourselves, found out a sequestered waterfall in a dell formed by steep hills covered with full-grown timber trees. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the country more romantic; it has the character of the less grand parts of the neighbourhood of the Lakes …
They had rambled as far as a large seventeenth- and eighteenth-century house, Alfoxden, hipped roof, wide cornice, far-gazing windows, in a large park, with seventy head of deer grazing and browsing around it. The sequestered waterfall was in the dell or combe or glen that formed the eastern boundary of the park, with the village of Holford on the far side. It turned out that the house was for rent – its owner, a St Albyn, was a minor, away as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and the Wordsworths could have it for £23 a year, taxes included. Tom Poole made the arrangements, and the lease was signed.
‘The house is a large mansion, with furniture enough for a dozen families like ours,’ Dorothy told her childhood friend Mary Hutchinson.
There is a very excellent garden, well stocked with vegetables and fruit. The garden is at the end of the house, and our favourite parlour, as at Racedown, looks that way. In front is a little court, with grass plot, gravel walk, and shrubs; the moss roses were in full beauty a month ago. The front of the house is to the south, but it is screened from the sun by a high hill which rises immediately from it. This hill is beautiful, scattered irregularly and abundantly with trees, and topped with fern, which spreads a considerable way down it. The deer dwell here, and sheep, so that we have a living prospect. From the end of the house we have a view of the sea, over a woody meadow-country; and exactly opposite the window where I now sit is an immense wood, whose round top from this point has exactly the appearance of a mighty dome. In some parts of this wood there is an under grove of hollies which are now very beautiful. In a glen at the bottom of the wood is the waterfall of which I spoke, a quarter of a mile from the house. We are three miles from Stowey, and not two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal … Walks extend for miles over the hill tops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity: they are perfectly smooth, without rocks. The Tor of Glastonbury is before our eyes during more than half of our walk to Stowey; and in the park wherever we go … it makes a part of our prospect …
Somehow the Wordsworths had brought their gentlemanliness with them, and had stumbled on a handsome pedimented house, filled with old hangings and ‘covered with the round-faced family portraits of the age of George I and II’, not unlike and actually larger than Racedown, with hints of Lonsdale grandeur. The way in which Dorothy described it to her friend feels nearly like an heiress coming into her own. Her language is virtually without the stock Romantic or even pre-Romantic phrases that would have displayed the fashionable attitudes to place. The only hint in these letters that she is not a straightforward member of the landowning classes is her love of the ‘wild simplicity’ of the hill tops. Otherwise it is a land surveyor’s account, allied to a calm and proprietorial description of an elegant landscape seen as the declaration of a well-ordered life and a contented household. The much-admired, sparkle-eyed observer of the slivers and specks of the natural world, the empathiser with the poor and troubled, the poet of the unnoticed and the everyday, seems to have slipped away here under the manners and modes of the gentleman and the squire.
Perhaps one can see in this the Dorothy who was the source of strength and connection in their lives, who sustained her broken brother, the irrigating woman-brook, ‘seen, heard, felt, and caught at every turn’. Audible in that account is ‘the voice of sudden admonition’ with which she recalled Wordsworth to his ‘office upon earth’, his destiny as a poet. Its authority is unmistakable. None of this was coming from Wordsworth himself, and in the months that followed, that ownership of settled beauty was the very opposite of what Wordsworth himself would find here.
Alfoxden – called by Coleridge ‘All the Foxes Den’ and by most people, dully, Alfoxton – remains a beautiful and haunting place. The house is now decrepit, and the park broken and ragged. It is scarcely visited. Unlike Coleridge’s spruced-up cottage in Nether Stowey, no National Trust care is applied to the flaking and rotting surfaces of these buildings. Little wrens play on the cornices and pied wagtails pick through the gravel where the moss roses