The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels. Adam Nicolson
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a week when the gentlemen were in residence, could come in to air and clean the house and do the laundry. Peggy Marsh worked as her maid. Wineglasses, tumblers and decanters could be provided, but these were all to be returned to Joseph Gill, the manager of house, farm and adjoining brickyard, when not required. A picture of Leda, naked with swan, in a gilt frame, belonging to the owners of the house, the Pinneys of Bristol, slave-owning plantation landlords and sugar-traders, was not required by the Wordsworths, and had been packed up and sent away.
It seems in retrospect the most unlikely situation for a man on the lip of revolution, but beneath the surface there is a more complex set of social and emotional conditions in play.
Wordsworth, aged twenty-seven, and his sister Dorothy, a year and a half younger, are borrowing, not renting, the house. They cannot afford the rent, and it has been lent to them by two young radical Bristol friends, the Pinneys, who have not told their far-from-radical father that they have lent out his house for nothing. The Wordsworths are camping here, happy to find a temporary perch in their peripatetic and impoverished life. They are living – or meant to be living – on the proceeds of a legacy which a young friend of Wordsworth had left to him when he died two years earlier. Wordsworth has in turn lent the money out to two other London friends who are meant to be paying him interest – at a handsome 10 per cent a year – but who regularly fail to come up with the payments or are late in doing so. For pin money Dorothy is now making shirts for her brother Richard, a London lawyer, cutting and sewing the linen from a huge bolt delivered to the house, for which she is also hemming sheets.
The Wordsworths in their gentleman’s house have to borrow money from Joseph Gill, the farmer (himself a cousin of the Pinneys, but drunk and disintegrated after a life in the Caribbean), and are given coal during the winter by other neighbours. There is meant to be a gardener, but he is ‘saucy’ and won’t do what either Wordsworth or Gill asks him, so Wordsworth does some of the gardening himself, uprooting hedges, planting potatoes and picking beans. He is, rather to his sister’s surprise, ‘dextrous with a spade’. She hires a boy to mow the lawns. Like the rural poor around them, they eat only vegetables and broth, and drink tea.
‘I have lately been living upon air and the essence of carrots cabbages turnips and other esculent vegetables, not excluding parsley the product of my garden,’ Wordsworth writes to a friend. They buy the worst of the meat at sixpence a pound from a butcher who comes with his cart from Crewkerne, and must depend for their clothes on the cast-offs from Richard in London. At times the whole household falls ill with coughs and colds. They walk everywhere, and the house has a ‘perambulator’, a measuring wheel which can clock off the distances along the road, although, as Wordsworth notes carefully in the inventory, its handle was already broken on their arrival. When the young Pinneys come from time to time, a moneyed interlude intervenes, during which Wordsworth goes shooting and hare-coursing with them and there is wine and meat and gravy, but when the Pinneys go back to Bristol, the austerity returns. Wordsworth must ask Gill to borrow household equipment, one tumbler or four sheets of paper at a time, and Gill carefully records each request in his diary.
Behind this there is a deeper personal history, hinged precisely to the gap between poverty and gentility. The Wordsworths’ father had been law agent to Sir James Lowther, a great landowner in Westmorland. John Wordsworth was a power in the land himself, a coroner worth some £10,000 when he died, living with silver coffee pots and handsome watches, a life lubricated with good port and madeira. He had brought up his children in the most handsome of houses in Cockermouth, with a beautiful garden at the back along whose boundary the River Derwent ran, and the sound of whose water came in through the windows of the bedrooms. But both Wordsworth parents had died when the children were young, the mother of pneumonia in March 1778, when William was seven, their father of a dropsy after spending a night out, lost on the winter fells, five years later. With his father’s death, their world collapsed. Sir James Lowther, soon to be the Earl of Lonsdale, owed John Wordsworth £4,625, but for years the Lonsdale estate refused to pay over the money. The key to the house the Wordsworths had lived in was surrendered to the Lonsdale agent, and the children were dispersed among their relatives, where they were treated as poor relations, humiliated and patronised by the servants and made to feel ashamed of who they were. ‘How we are squandered abroad!’ Dorothy had written of these years.
In 1787 Wordsworth was sent to Cambridge, and encouraged by those relations to think of a career in the Church. But at Cambridge, while ferociously aware of his own great gifts, he had refused to engage with the route required by a conventional career, and had been ‘an idler among academic bowers’. The great emotional and intellectual experience of his time as an undergraduate was not at Cambridge itself, but on a heroic three-thousand-mile walk in the summer and autumn of 1790 through France in the first glow of its revolutionary fever, to Switzerland and the epic landscapes of the Alps. France then was ‘standing on the top of golden hours/And human nature seeming born again’.
After he had left university, with no good degree, he went to London, directionless and unfocused, unable to commit to any life in the Church, the law, university, politics or commerce. He felt ‘rotted’:
my life became
A floating island, an amphibious thing
Unsound, of spungy texture.
But the scent of liberty was coming across the Channel. A decade earlier, the Americans had cast themselves free. Now an ancient European monarchy was heading for a rational, liberated future. Richard Price, a suddenly famous dissenting minister-turned-lecturer, was drawing vast crowds to his London talks. ‘A general amendment’, he told his excited audience, was beginning in human affairs:
the dominion of kings [is] changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience. Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defence!
Once again, Wordsworth was drawn to France, not only to escape the urgings of his relatives, who had in mind a rural curacy, but to taste and know the sources of the future. This time he went to the Loire valley, where, even as the massacres were committed in Paris and the French Republic was being declared, he met two people who had a shaping influence on his life and thought. The first was an officer in the army, Armand-Michel Bacharetie de Beaupuy, known simply as Michel Beaupuy, an aristocrat from the Périgord, now in his mid-thirties, and a republican idealist, who in Wordsworth’s loving remembering of him in The Prelude sounds like a vision of the perfect man. They talked politics and the virtues of change, weighing the best of ancient republican systems against the extremes of revolutionary violence, sifting what seemed good from the horrors and strains of the moment.
Injuries
Made him more gracious, and his nature then
Did breathe its sweetness out most sensibly,
As aromatic flowers on Alpine turf,
When foot hath crushed them.
By birth he ranked
With the most noble, but unto the poor
Among mankind he was in service bound,
As by some tie invisible, oaths professed
To a religious order. Man he loved
As man, and, to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension; but did rather seem
A passion and a gallantry, like that
Which he, a soldier, in his idler day
Had paid to woman: somewhat vain he was,
Or seemed so – yet it was not vanity,
But fondness, and a kind of radiant joy
That covered him about when he was intent
On works of love or freedom.
Beaupuy looked like an oasis