Читать книгу The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge - Adam Sisman - Страница 11

Wordsworth arrived in England in December 1792 overflowing with love for humanity, only to find the majority of his fellow countrymen suspicious or even belligerent. Recent events in France had thoroughly alarmed conservative opinion in Britain. It was one thing to limit the powers of the monarchy: quite another to abolish the monarchy altogether. With each passing week came news of further excesses; émigrés arrived by the boatload on British shores, every one bringing stories of fresh outrages. In its anxiety to avoid war, Pitt’s government had striven to remain neutral towards Revolutionary France, while stifling radical agitation at home. On 21 May 1792 a Royal Proclamation had been issued, encouraging magistrates to be more vigorous in controlling riotous meetings and seditious writings. Not much had ensued at the time, beyond a decision (perhaps taken beforehand) to prosecute Paine.

Meanwhile the victorious French armies had continued their advance, carrying all before them. The Prussians were driven back across the Rhine, and in November the French occupied Belgium, while in the south Savoy was annexed. On 19 November the Convention promised ‘fraternity and assistance’ to ‘all those wishing to recover their liberty’. The war changed its character: it was no longer a defence of the Republic, but a war of liberation. In the Convention Brissot declared, ‘We cannot relax until all Europe is in flames.’

The Convention’s threat to export the Revolution prompted Pitt to act, beginning a succession of prosecutions of radical authors, printers and publishers. At the same time the government released a flood of crude anti-French, pro-monarchist propaganda. Stories spread of plots, of insurrection, of traitors in our midst. Spies, informers and agents provocateurs proliferated. Support for the Revolution was portrayed as unpatriotic. It was not difficult to stir up popular sentiment against France, nor against those who appeared to side with the Old Enemy. Dissenters were especially vulnerable. By this time religious dissent and political radicalism had become synonymous; it was easy to portray prominent dissenters as pro-French Revolutionary conspirators. There had already been an ominous indication of what could happen if the crude prejudices of the people were inflamed. Back in 1791, a dinner in Birmingham to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille had provoked three days of rioting. Though the mob chanted ‘No Popery’ (as well as the inevitable ‘Church and King’), its victims were mainly prosperous dissenters with progressive views, most prominently Joseph Priestley, whose house (including his precious library) and laboratory were burned to the ground.

Britons were encouraged to draw up loyal addresses to George III. Those who declined to add their signatures were deemed to be suspect. Loyalists powdered their hair in the traditional style, while radicals let it hang loose in the ‘French’ fashion. Inns displayed gilt signs: ‘No JACOBINS ADMITTED HERE’. In November the MP John Reeves founded an anti-Jacobin association, and branches sprang up around the country, a counter-revolutionary equivalent to the Jacobin clubs. A month later Reeves founded an Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, which met fortnightly at the Crown and Anchor tavern in The Strand. Burke proposed the toast: ‘Old England against new France’.

A further Royal Proclamation on 1 December 1792 summoned the militia to suppress ‘seditious activities’. Parliament was recalled to combat the threat of insurrection. In the House of Commons, Fox attempted to calm exaggerated fears:

An insurrection! Where is it? Where has it reared its head! Good God! An insurrection in Great Britain! No wonder the militia were called out, and parliament assembled in the extraordinary way in which they have been. But where is it?¹

But his ironic words were scarcely heard in the storm of panic sweeping across the country. Fox’s allies began to desert him, going over to the ministry one by one, until eventually he would be left with only a rump of loyal supporters, too small to be able to make any serious challenge in Parliament.

The case against Paine had come to court in June, only to be adjourned. It was widely rumoured that the Attorney-General was reluctant to proceed to trial because he did not approve of the prosecution (a charge he denied). But the government’s own propaganda created pressure to make an example of Paine. He was dogged by government hirelings who hissed and hooted at him on every public occasion. Pillars of the community demonstrated their loyalty by burning his book in public.

Paine was among well-wishers at Joseph Johnson’s house in St Paul’s Churchyard one evening when another radical, the poet William Blake, warned him not to go home; a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Paine left that night for Dover. Within days he had taken up his seat in the Convention. On 18 December he was tried in absentia, and after being found guilty by a packed jury, was declared an outlaw.* Demonstrations against him were promoted around the country. His effigy was burned, shot at, hanged, and pounded to smithereens with a sledgehammer. According to the undergraduate Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then making a rare visit to his home town of Ottery St Mary, the locals were very disappointed that Paine had not been ‘cut to pieces at Canterbury’.

Such was the atmosphere when Wordsworth returned to England: a dismaying contrast with the mood in France – and about to become much worse. On 21 January 1793 the former King of France went to the guillotine. The news horrified the British public. (In the Convention, Paine had tried to argue against the execution, only to be shouted down by Marat.) Radicals were already divided in their responses to the developing situation in France, and on the defensive against the new programme of government repression. Now public opinion hardened against them. Just as the radical cause in Britain had been boosted by the outbreak of the Revolution, so it was undermined by the killing of the King.

John Frost, secretary of the Corresponding Society, was among the country’s most prominent radicals. He had been one of the pair of delegates sent to Paris by the Society for Constitutional Information to assure the French Convention that the British people would never support a war against liberty. In this capacity he had been present at Louis XVI’s trial, and as a result he had been denounced by Burke as ‘the ambassador to the murderers’. Early in 1793 Frost was arrested on a charge of sedition, on the basis of an alleged conversation in Percy’s coffee house, Marylebone; he was supposed to have declared that he wanted ‘no king in England’, and that ‘the constitution of this country is a bad one’. (It seems that he was drunk at the time.) On these flimsy grounds Frost was struck off the attorney’s roll, imprisoned for six months, required to provide £500 as a surety of good behaviour for five years or face prolonged imprisonment until he did so, and made to stand in the pillory for an hour. (The latter was no small punishment; men had been mutilated or even killed as a result of blows received in the pillory.) Frost’s was one of a number of prosecutions for sedition promoted by the government in the spring of 1793 in an attempt to intimidate radicals.

On 29 January Wordsworth’s poems ‘An Evening Walk’ and ‘Descriptive Sketches’ were published by Joseph Johnson in two quarto volumes. If not quite his first appearance in print – a poem of his had been published in the European Magazine – these were, at the very least, an attempt to prove himself: ‘as I had done nothing by which to distinguish myself at the university, I thought these little things might shew that I could do something’.² But his hopes fell flat. Reviews were cool and sales were slow. Given the timing, that was hardly surprising. Three days after the poems were published, France declared war on Britain. ‘Descriptive Sketches’, which concluded in a hymn of praise to the new Republic, could scarcely have appeared at a less propitious moment.

The coming of war increased Wordsworth’s sense of alienation. He loved his country deeply; and hated what his country was doing. For him, Revolutionary France was the hope of Mankind; now his own kin made war on her, in unholy alliance with the despotic emperors of central Europe. Even now these tyrants were carving up Poland between them, crudely annexing the territory of a free people. Wordsworth secretly rejoiced at news of British defeats, and in church sat silent among the congregation, ‘like an uninvited guest’, while prayers were offered up for British victories.

Oh, much have they to account for, who could tear

By violence at one decisive rent

From the best youth in England their dear pride,

Their joy, in England … ³

In France, Wordsworth had come to feel himself a patriot; in England he was made to feel a traitor. Moreover, war with France divided him from his mistress and his daughter, born in December and baptised in the cathedral at Orléans. It was, as he recognised, a profound shock to his moral nature:

… I felt

The ravage of this most unnatural strife

In my own heart; there lay it like a weight

At enmity with all the tenderest springs

Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze

Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree

Of my beloved country – nor had wished

For happier fortune than to wither there –

Now from my pleasant station was cut off,

And tossed about in whirlwinds … ⁴

Since his return from France Wordsworth had been lodging with his elder brother Richard, a lawyer in Staple Inn.* According to De Quincey, his companions were forced to play cards with him every night, ‘as the best mode of beguiling his sense of distress’. Disaffected and resentful, he was indignant to read the strictures on the French Revolution by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. The Bishop’s remarks were written in response to the execution of Louis XVI, and rushed into print a few days afterwards as an appendix to a sermon delivered eight years earlier. The very title of the original sermon was provocative: ‘The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor’. It was hard to take such stuff from anyone, least of all from a man renowned for his venality. But it was the new appendix that especially infuriated Wordsworth. Watson commended the British government’s measures against radicals, ‘the flagitious dregs of a nation’. When the Revolution began, Watson had given his ‘hearty approbation’ to the French attempts to free themselves from arbitrary power, just as he had sided with the American colonists – but recent developments in France had caused him to ‘fly with terror and abhorrence from the altar of liberty’. Pitt’s administration was right not to tolerate the ‘wild fancies and turbulent tempers of discontented or ill-informed individuals’. The British constitution might not be perfect, but it already provided as much liberty and equality as was desirable, and was far too excellent to be amended by ‘peasants and mechanics’. British courts were impartial and incorrupt; parliamentary reform was unnecessary; provision for the poor in Britain was so liberal as to discourage industry. ‘Look round the globe,’ urged Watson complacently, ‘and see if you can discover a single nation on all its surface so powerful, so rich, so beneficial, so free and happy as our own.’

Such opinions were not uncommon. The Scottish Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Braxfield, for example, held that the British constitution was perfect; and therefore that anyone proposing any change was prima facie guilty of sedition. But Watson’s words particularly irritated Wordsworth. Maybe it was because he read them at an especially vulnerable moment. And maybe it was the author himself, as much as what he wrote, that irritated him. Wordsworth and Watson had much in common. Like Wordsworth, Watson came from the Lakes, and indeed lived there still, on the banks of Windermere (far from Llandaff). Like Wordsworth, Watson was a Cambridge man. Until now he had been known as a levelling prelate, the Bishop of dissenters – which rendered his defection more grievous. He had risen from modest origins, a fact that made his condescending attitude to the poor even more unforgivable.

Wordsworth wrote a furious retort, which he entitled ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, on the Extraordinary Avowal of his Political Principles’. He defended the killings in France, including the execution of the King, as ‘a convulsion from which is to spring a fairer order of things’. Contrasting the Bishop of Llandaff with the Bishop of Blois, he quoted Grégoire’s words at the opening of the Convention, and repeatedly stressed the unanimity of twenty-five million Frenchmen as in itself legitimising acts carried out in their name. Declaring himself to be ‘an advocate of republicanism’, he argued the necessity of abolishing not just the monarchy, but the aristocracy too. This system of ‘fictitious superiority’ produced idleness, corruption, hypocrisy, sycophancy, pride and luxury. Poverty bred misery, promiscuity and prostitution. Britons were like slaves:

We are taught from infancy that we were born in a state of inferiority to our oppressors, that they were sent into the world to scourge and we to be scourged. Accordingly we see the bulk of mankind actuated by these fatal prejudices, even more ready to lay themselves under the feet of the great, than the great are to trample upon them.

Wordsworth’s use of the first person plural identified him with the oppressed, the ‘swinish multitude’ of Burke’s notorious sneer. ‘Redress is in our power’ – but the popular mind had been ‘debauched’.

Left to the quiet exercise of their own judgment do you think the people would have thought it necessary to set fire to the house of the philosophic Priestley, and to hunt down his life like that of a traitor or a parricide; – that, deprived almost of the necessaries of existence by the burden of their taxes, they would cry out as with one voice for a war from which not a single ray of consolation can visit them to compensate for the additional keenness with which they are about to smart under the scourge of labour, of cold, and of hunger?

Wordsworth deplored the ‘infatuation with war, ‘which is now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor and consigning the rest to the more slow and painful consumption of want’. Drawing on his own experience of the Lonsdale lawsuit, he condemned ‘the thorny labyrinth of litigation’, ‘the consuming expense of our never-ending process, the verbosity of unintelligible statutes, and the perpetual contrariety in our judicial decisions’. In a bitterly sarcastic finale he thanked the Bishop for his ‘desertion’ from the friends of liberty, ‘conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable than when drawn out against us’.⁵*

Wordsworth’s arguments were made with passionate fervour. In them one can trace the influence of the seventeenth-century Puritans, republican writers like Sidney, Marvell and Harrington, as well as that of Paine and the French orators whose debates he had heard so recently.⁶ But primarily this was a very personal piece of writing, the fierce heat of the author’s emotions blazing on the page. It is beyond question that Wordsworth wanted to blast Watson. Yet his diatribe was not published. Why not?

It is suggestive that the surviving manuscript of the ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ is not in Wordsworth’s hand. Perhaps he had a fair copy made as a first step towards publication, and then something prevented him from proceeding? It may have been difficult to find a publisher willing to risk publishing such an intemperate pamphlet in such a combustible climate. There was also a considerable risk to Wordsworth himself, even if he published it anonymously. To sign yourself ‘a Republican’ at such a moment, as Wordsworth had done, was provocative; it implied approval of Louis’s execution. ‘The very term is become one of the most opprobrious in the English Language,’ Priestley was quoted as saying in February 1793. The author of such a pamphlet would be notorious if identified; he might well face prosecution, like Frost; he could certainly abandon any hopes he might still cherish of preferment in the Church, or in any other profession. Some years later Gilbert Wakefield would be sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for writing what was deemed to be a seditious pamphlet,* in response to another effusion of Watson’s. Wordsworth’s elder brother may have urged him to suppress the work. Perhaps prudence triumphed over passion.

Whatever happened, the letter to the Bishop did not appear in print. Wordsworth remained angry and frustrated.

If Wordsworth had been in any doubt about the risks of publishing his ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ at such a time, he needed to look no further than his old university, where proceedings were beginning against William Frend, a Fellow of Jesus College, for publishing what was in most ways a much more innocuous pamphlet. Its title, Peace and Union,† does not sound particularly provocative. But early in 1793 ‘peace’ was a dirty word.

Cambridge attitudes to the Revolution reflected those of the country as a whole. The university had welcomed its early manifestations; there had been a proposal to hold an annual dinner to mark the fall of the Bastille. The young men were encouraged to write on the subject. In September 1790 one of them delivered a prize-winning speech in Trinity College chapel in memory of William III, hero of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, making an explicit comparison with recent events in France: ‘Liberty has begun her progress, and hope tells us, that she has only begun.’⁷

Subsequent developments across the Channel had divided opinion in Cambridge, as they had divided opinion everywhere. Many of the older men recoiled from the violent disturbances that ensued as the French authorities lost control of events. In the summer of 1792 they signalled their feelings by sending a loyal address to King George. But not all of them concurred. Radicals and reformists sympathetic to the revolutionaries constituted an intellectually active minority within the university, centred on Frend’s college, Jesus. Many of these were more or less openly nonconformist (particularly Unitarian). Though in theory it was impossible to take a degree or to obtain a college Fellowship without subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles (the measure of conformity to the Church of England), in practice there was a degree of toleration. Nonconformists were not permitted to teach, but they were usually allowed to retain their Fellowships and to reside in college.

Among the undergraduates, the developing Revolution stimulated impassioned debate. Younger men were much more open to change, much less wary of turmoil. Some zealots relished Revolutionary violence as a necessary purge; others justified it in the service of a greater good. Revolutionary rhetoric made a compelling appeal to the young; the high ideals of the revolutionaries contrasted strongly with the cynical corruption omnipresent in British society. The Revolution stressed abstract virtues: liberty, fraternity and equality. Its reactionary opponents seemed negative in their reliance on tradition, caution and stability. The revolutionaries believed in the nobility of man – though not of course in that of certain criminal individuals – and what young person does not believe in the nobility of man? The Revolution was the future, or so it seemed. To the intellectually curious, this experiment in humanity could not but be fascinating.

Moreover, it was hard not to feel moved by the events in France. Who could fail to be stirred by the heroic defence of the Republic against seemingly insuperable odds? Professional armies of mercenaries had been beaten back by untrained boys. In Paris, barely-armed citizens, men and women alike, had prevailed time and again against the organised musketry of soldiers. The Convention itself was a theatre, its theme the fate of mankind, its principals men like Marat and Robespierre, distinguished not by the pedigree of their bloodlines but by their strength of character, their courage, their conviction, their purity.

As tension increased between Britain and France, so divisions at home became deeper and the debate more heated. In Cambridge, as in the rest of the country, positions were hardening. There were riots in the city that winter: a dissenters’ meeting house and several shops were attacked. Tom Paine was burned in effigy on the last day of 1792. A hundred and twelve local publicans solemnly pledged to report to the magistrates treasonable or seditious conversations, books, or pamphlets. Nonetheless, ‘pamphlets swarmed from the press’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was then in his second year at Jesus, and according to his fellow undergraduate and former schoolmate Charles Valentine Le Grice, his room was ‘the constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends’. There was no need for the other undergraduates to read the latest pamphlets, because Coleridge had read them all on the morning they appeared; ‘and in the evening, with our negus,* we had them viva voce gloriously’.⁸

One such pamphlet was Fox’s Letter to the Westminster Electors, which followed the line he had taken in Parliament in attempting to soothe the ‘false alarm’ raging in the country. Fox believed the government to be deliberately stirring up animosity towards reformists and dissenters, using rumour and hearsay in support of its repressive policies. Evidently Coleridge was sympathetic to Fox’s views. ‘Have you read Mr Fox’s letter to the Westminster Electors?’ he wrote to his sweetheart, Mary Evans. ‘It is quite the political Go at Cambridge, and has converted many souls to the Foxite faith.’ He signed his letter ‘with the ardour of fraternal friendship’.⁹

William Frend’s Peace and Union appeared a few days later. Frend lamented the fact that Britain was on the brink of war, a war against the friends of mankind. He aimed to reconcile the ‘contending parties’, the advocates of a republic and the defenders of the constitution. Britain was split into two camps, he wrote: ‘the minds of men are at present greatly agitated; and the utmost rigour of government, aided by the exertions of every lover of his country, is necessary to preserve us, from falling into all the horrors attendant on civil commotions’. As a prominent dissenter, Frend had good reason to fear public disorder. He had already suffered at the hands of the mob, when the manuscript of a book on which he had been collaborating with Joseph Priestley was burned during the 1791 Birmingham riots. He was horrified by the ‘assassinations, murders, massacres, burning of houses, plundering of property, [and] open violations of justice’ which had marked the progress of the French Revolution. For him, the moral to be drawn from these events was clear: that abuses and grievances should be corrected as soon as they were known. ‘Had the French monarch seasonably given up some useless prerogatives, he might still have worn the crown; had the nobility consented to relinquish those noble privileges, which were designed only for barbarous ages, they might have retained their titles; could the clergy have submitted to be citizens, they might still have been in possession of wealth and influence.’ To prevent similar upheaval here in Britain, argued Frend, parliamentary reform was essential.¹⁰

Though this might seem reasonable enough, the university authorities decided otherwise. The Master and Fellows of Jesus College passed resolutions condemning Frend, and initiated proceedings that would lead to his expulsion from the college and ultimate banishment from the city. The case provoked letters to the papers in Frend’s defence, and he attracted plenty of undergraduate support: slogans such as ‘Frend and Liberty!’ or ‘Frend for Ever!!’ were chalked or daubed on college walls, and even etched in gunpowder on the lawn of Trinity College quadrangle.

Frend’s prosecution could be explained only in terms of the polarised politics of the moment. Though his pamphlet expressed opinions that would have upset many of his colleagues – defending the execution of Louis XVI and opposing the war with France – these could hardly be described as seditious. The Vice-Chancellor virtually admitted that the trial had been a political one when he later asserted that the expulsion of Frend had been ‘the ruin of the Jacobinical party as a University thing’. That this was no isolated event became obvious in the late summer, with the trials of several Scottish radicals. One of these, the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a Unitarian minister and a former Fellow of Queen’s College, was sentenced to seven years’ transportation, his crime’ being to have corrected the proofs of a handbill written by a Dundee weaver (deemed to be seditious). Things had come to a pretty pass when former Cambridge Fellows were being shipped off in fetters to Australia.

Frend’s trial in the university court began on 3 May 1793, frequently interrupted by (in the Vice-Chancellor’s words) ‘noisy and tumultuous irregularities of conduct’ from the undergraduates who filled the public gallery, applauding the defendant and heckling his accusers. The university authorities attempted to suppress the rowdiness, and after he had called the Vice-Chancellor’s attention to one young man ostentatiously clapping, the Senior Proctor was given permission to make an arrest. The Proctor hurried into the gallery to seize the miscreant, but too late; the culprit had fled. The young protestor was later identified as ‘S.T. Coleridge, of Jesus College’.

A contemporary report in the Morning Chronicle had the Proctor apprehend the wrong man, who, on being accused of clapping, demonstrated that a deformed arm made him incapable of doing so, producing a barrage of ironic applause from the other undergraduates. (Coleridge himself may have been the source of this anecdote. In an account he gave many years later, the young man arrested had an iron hook instead of a hand. This sounds like a story that improved with age.)

Coleridge escaped with a reprimand, though he seems to have been prominent (if not conspicuous) among Frend’s undergraduate supporters. He had known and admired Frend for the past year and a half, and had absorbed many of his ideas. ‘Mr Frend’s company is by no means invidious,’ he had written teasingly to his elder brother George¹¹ – a cautious, caring, respectable person, who had no doubt expressed some concern at Sam’s association with such a prominent dissenter. George stood as unofficial guardian to his baby brother, and had done so since the death of their father in 1781. Coleridge often described George – the most scholarly of his siblings – as a kind of father, though George was only eight years his senior. ‘You have always been a brother to me in kindness and a father in wisdom,’ he wrote to George late in 1792.¹²

Coleridge was then just twenty (two years younger than Wordsworth), loose-limbed and scruffy, ‘a very gentle Bear’ with long curling black hair, fleshy lips, dark heavy eyebrows and large blue eyes, sometimes distant, sometimes burning with impatient energy. (He believed himself to be ugly, and referred to the ‘fat vacuity’ of his face.¹³) He had gone up to Cambridge in October 1791, some ten months after Wordsworth left. A child prodigy, Coleridge promised greatness. At the age of three he could read a chapter in the Bible. He read every book that came his way, and showed astonishing retentive power, being able to recite large chunks of any work after only one reading. At school he soon outstripped all the other boys. The youngest of ten children (one of whom died in infancy), he was the favourite of the family. ‘My Father was very fond of me, and I was my mother’s darling,’ he wrote in retrospect; ‘in consequence, I was very miserable.’ His brother Frank, the next youngest, was jealous of this attention. He had one sister, Anne (known as Nancy), five years older, who petted him and became his confidante, listening to his ‘puny sorrows’ and ‘hidden maladies’. Maybe he was a spoiled child; he certainly seems to have been wilful:

… I became a dreamer – and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity – and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at any thing, and was slothful, I was despised & hated by the boys; and because I could read & spell, & had, I may truly say, a memory & understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was flattered & wondered at by all the old women – & so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys, that were at all near my own age – and before I was eight years old, I was a character … ¹⁴

His father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was both vicar of the Devon town where the family lived, Ottery St Mary, and headmaster of the local school. He was a gentle and learned man, absent-minded and unworldly, with several obscure publications to his name. Coleridge remembered that his father ‘used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me’.¹⁵ But John Coleridge was already fifty-three when his youngest child was born, and he died suddenly a few weeks before Sam’s ninth birthday. The family was now in difficult circumstances. Soon afterwards Coleridge was sent away to a charitable boarding school, Christ’s Hospital in London, from which it seems that he rarely returned home to Ottery. This felt to him like a rejection, and afterwards he never showed any affection towards his mother. ‘Boy! the School is your father! The School is your mother!’ bellowed his headmaster William Bowyer as he flogged the tearful child.

Coleridge’s brilliance earned him the status and privileges of a ‘Grecian’, a pupil destined for Oxford or Cambridge who wore a special uniform to distinguish him from the ordinary ‘blue-coat boys’. He won his place at Jesus in a blaze of honours. It was assumed that he was headed for the Church. A glorious career was in prospect; he might become a bishop, or perhaps headmaster of one of the great public schools.*

He read voraciously; years later he told his first biographer, James Gillman, that at fourteen, ‘My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read.’ When an older schoolboy gave him a volume of William Lisle Bowles’s evocative and melancholy sonnets, Coleridge was so entranced that he painstakingly wrote out forty copies for distribution to friends. Bowles’s verse became a model for his own work, and Bowles himself a master whom the young Coleridge revered. When he later happened to see Bowles crossing the marketplace in Salisbury, Coleridge was too shy to speak to him.

Every schoolboy of this era was expected to write verse, both for its own sake and as an exercise in the study of Latin and Greek, translating classical originals into English. Coleridge’s early poetry was conventional stuff. It followed the classical models predominant in eighteenth-century verse, written in a convoluted ‘poetic’ diction that would soon come to be seen as artificial, characterised by elaborate abstractions far removed from everyday experience. The effect was strained, even turgid. Tired metaphors and phrases clogged up the lines. There was an excess of ornamentation, with too many double epithets. Bowyer tried to counter this tendency, to instil a bias towards the plainest form of words. He had a list of forbidden introductions, similes and expressions. ‘Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your Nurse’s daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye the cloister-pump, I suppose!’

One of Coleridge’s earliest poems was his ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’. Like Coleridge, Thomas Chatterton had been a blue-coat boy, the orphaned son of a Bristol schoolmaster, a precocious poet who at the age of sixteen claimed to have discovered a chestful of poems, letters and other documents written by a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley. Though these aroused interest and indeed excitement, Chatterton failed to prosper by them, and at the age of only eighteen, alone in a London garret, he committed suicide, driven by poverty to despair. The tragic story of neglected genius cut off at such an early age caught the imagination of young men everywhere, and Coleridge was one of many who identified powerfully with him, ominously heading his poem ‘A Monody on Chatterton, who poisoned himself at the age of eighteen – written by the author at the age of sixteen’.

In his last year at school Coleridge was confined for long months to the Christ’s Hospital sanatorium, lying in bed while hearing the boys outside laugh and play. He had become seriously ill after swimming fully clothed in the nearby New River, and afterwards wearing his wet clothes as they slowly dried on his back. Unsurprisingly he developed a fever, complicated by jaundice, no doubt as a result of the foul water in which he had immersed himself. His friend and first biographer James Gillman believed that all his future bodily sufferings could be dated from this episode.* Coleridge was a young man of enormous energy and robust vitality, yet he succumbed to recurrent attacks of illness. There was also a lasting psychological effect of this long period of convalescence. In the school sanatorium his nurse’s daughter, Jenny Edwards, helped to care for him, and he developed sentimental feelings for her; as he recovered he wrote a sonnet in her honour – which adds piquancy to Bowyer’s reported jibe about his ‘Muse’:

Fair as the bosom of the Swan

That rises graceful o’er the wave,

I’ve seen thy breast with pity heave,

And therefore love I thee, sweet Genevieve!

Forever after, Coleridge would derive a perverse erotic satisfaction from being helpless in the care of a desirable woman.

While ill he was regularly dosed with laudanum,* then prescribed as a panacea. Not only did opium relieve pain; it prompted delicious dreams that soothed the mind of the fevered boy. In future he was to resort to its use whenever he felt ill, or under pressure.

During his last year at Christ’s Hospital, Coleridge received news that his ‘sweet sister’ had died of consumption. By this time four of his brothers were already dead. Four remained, three of them much older than him. Frank (the nearest in age) had already gone away to sea, and subsequently joined the army in India. A year later he too would be dead, after receiving a wound during the siege of Seringapatam. This left the young Coleridge isolated, with no siblings near to him in age – but he found a surrogate family in the widowed mother and three sisters of a schoolmate, Tom Evans. They lived in Villiers Street, not far from the school, and Coleridge spent his Saturdays there. The Evans women provided substitute sisters and a substitute mother, whom he hoped would love him and be amused by his antics. By the time he left for Cambridge he believed himself in love with the eldest girl, Mary, though he was too shy to declare himself. Instead he wrote them all (including the mother) jokey, flirtatious letters. After his first university term he returned to them for Christmas in a poor state of health, and Mrs Evans nursed him tenderly. ‘Believe me, that You and my Sisters have the very first row in the front box of my Heart’s little theatre,’ he wrote to her afterwards, ‘and – God knows! you are not crowded.’¹⁷

In his first year at Cambridge Coleridge distinguished himself by winning a prize for a Greek ode on the then topical subject of the slave trade.* At the end of 1792 he narrowly failed to win a university scholarship, reaching the shortlist of four. Perhaps it was not surprising that he failed, given that for the six weeks preceding the examination – so he later said – he was almost constantly intoxicated. By this time he had acquired a reputation within Cambridge for his excellent classical scholarship, poetical language, and ‘a peculiar style of conversation’ – perhaps a euphemism, since Coleridge was always more inclined to talk than to listen.¹⁸ ‘He was very studious,’ recalled Valentine Le Grice, ‘but his reading was desultory and capricious.’¹⁹ Coleridge himself claimed to have been ‘a proverb to the University for Idleness’.²⁰

He was also hopeless with money. Perhaps this judgement is harsh, because he never had a lot to spend, and was disappointed by his failure to win a scholarship. An annual income of almost £100 from a Christ’s Hospital exhibition and two university awards, together with the odd handout from his brothers, should have been enough to keep him, however. But he seemed incapable of living within his means. On his arrival at Cambridge he rashly gave an upholsterer carte blanche to redecorate his rooms, and was then ‘stupefied’ by the size of the bill. Soon he was drinking heavily, and he seems to have resumed taking opium, ‘building magnificent edifices of happiness on some fleeting shadow of reality’ in ‘soul-enervating reveries’. He often stole away to London, where there were plenty of temptations to empty his purse. Early in 1793 he wrote to his brother George summarising the state of his finances. He outlined his plans for a book of translations of ‘the best Lyric poems from the Greek, and the modern Latin writers’ – the first of many unrealised schemes. By raising two hundred subscriptions to this work, he felt that he would be able to pay off his debts, ‘which have corroded my Spirits greatly for some time Past’. He reckoned them at £58. Though George sent him some money, he was soon behind again. By the end of his second year at Cambridge he had somehow managed to run up further debts, which he now calculated, with misleading precision, at £148.17s.1¼d. He returned to Devon and presented himself before his older brothers with some trepidation. ‘I am fearful, that your Silence proceeds from Displeasure – If so, what is left for me to do – but to grieve? The Past is not in my Power – for the follies, of which I may have been guilty, I have been greatly disquieted – and I trust, the Memory of them will operate to future consistency of Conduct.’²¹

Coleridge’s brothers provided him with a sum to stave off his creditors, but he quickly frittered away much of this, loitering ten days in Tiverton to conduct a flirtation with Miss Fanny Nesbitt, ‘a very pretty girl’ he met on the coach. Rather than returning directly to Cambridge, he lingered in London in order to be near Mary Evans. While walking between a tavern and a shop where he went to purchase a lottery ticket, he composed a poem, ‘To Fortune’, which was published in the Morning Chronicle. On his arrival back in college he discovered further embarrassments, ‘which in my wild carelessness I had forgotten, and many of which I had contracted almost without knowing it’. Desperate, he fled back to London at eleven o’clock at night, where for three days he lived in a ‘tempest of pleasure’. He returned to Cambridge and stayed a week, then left again for London, by now in a state of delirium. ‘When Vice has not annihilated Sensibility, there is little need of a Hell!’²² There he seems to have contemplated suicide – but after a night in ‘a house of ill-fame’, ruminating in a chair, and an agitated morning walk in the park, he sought refuge instead in the bosom of the army, enlisting in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

Little is known of Wordsworth’s life in the period after his return from France at the end of 1792. For us this is a dark time – no letters of his survive written between September 1792, when he was still in Blois, and February 1794. Almost all that can be deduced of his activities during these lost seventeen months derives from incidental remarks in Dorothy’s letters to her friend Jane Pollard, or from The Prelude. Until the twentieth century only a handful of close family members knew of his involvement with Annette Vallon. But soon after the First World War, two letters from Annette that had been intercepted by the French police almost 130 years earlier surfaced in the Loir-et-Cher archives. Both were dated 20 March 1793. One was addressed to Dorothy, the other to ‘Williams’. Emotion overflows from both; they lack punctuation; the spelling is idiosyncratic and inconsistent. They read like the letters of a naïve young girl, not a woman of nearly twenty-seven. The content is in each case repetitive and confused. She swings one way and then the other, longing for him, yet fearing that he may be taken prisoner if he returns. It would comfort her, she writes, if he could come and give her the ‘glorious’ title of his wife, even if ‘cruel necessity’ would compel him to leave immediately. ‘Come, my love, my husband, and receive the tender embraces of your wife, of your daughter,’ she urges, apparently expecting his imminent arrival. Their child, now three months old and baptised ‘Anne-Caroline Wordswodsth’, she tells him, ‘grows more and more like you every day’. Holding her baby close enough to feel her heart beat, Annette imagines how it will stir when she says, ‘Caroline, in a month, in a fortnight, in a week, you are going to see the most beloved of men, the most tender of men.’ She ends by sending him a thousand kisses, ‘sur la bouche, sur les yeux et mon petit* que j’aime toujours, que je recomande bien a tes soins’. Mention of other letters shows that she and Wordsworth were in regular correspondence, and her letter to Dorothy (enclosed with the one to William) makes it obvious that he has confided in his sister; Annette has already received at least one welcoming letter from her, perhaps more. She writes of the time, a little further off, when the three of them will live together in ‘notre petit ménage’. As for Caroline, ‘My dear sister, you will be her second mother.’²³

It is not impossible that Wordsworth might have returned to France in 1793. Provision existed for non-combatants to travel between warring countries. The scientist Humphry Davy, for example, was invited to lecture in France at the height of the struggle between the two nations. Of course, there would have been difficulties, and this was a particularly hazardous time, the rule of law in France being so uncertain. Annette hoped that Wordsworth would return to legitimise their union, while acknowledging that it could be only a short visit; they would make a home together once the war was over. There was a widespread belief (which Annette shared) that it would not last long, now that the might of Great Britain had been added to that of the Continental Allies. France appeared to be in chaos, without an effective government while at war with almost all of Europe. After their initial successes, French armies were everywhere in retreat. The security of the young Republic was undermined by uprisings in several parts of the country in the spring of 1793, including a serious revolt in the Vendée.

These letters of Annette’s never reached Wordsworth or his sister, and there is no evidence to indicate whether Wordsworth did consider returning to France to marry her. According to Dorothy, he was then ‘looking out and wishing for the opportunity of engaging himself as Tutor to some young Gentleman’.²⁴ Early in July he set off on a tour of the West Country in the company of William Calvert, a friend from their days as fellow pupils at Hawkshead School. Calvert had become a man of property on the death of his father, and he offered to pay all their travelling expenses; since Wordsworth had nothing else to do, he accepted. They passed a month of ‘calm and glassy days’ on the Isle of Wight. In the evenings Wordsworth walked along the seashore, the prospect of the Channel fleet at Spithead preparing for sea always before him; as the sun set he would hear the evening cannon. But this magnificent sight only deepened his sense of isolation, symbolising as it did the division in his heart. He was full of melancholy and foreboding. He did not share the general confidence that the war would swiftly be brought to a successful conclusion. He had witnessed the spirit prevailing in France, and foresaw a long struggle ahead, ‘productive of distress and misery beyond all possible calculation’.²⁵

The French were dealing with the crisis in their own ruthless fashion. A decree was proclaimed condemning all rebels to summary execution; watch committees were set up in communes throughout the country; a Revolutionary tribunal was established to try traitors. In April a Committee of Public Safety with extraordinary powers came into being, which soon began to aggrandise all the powers of the executive. Later that summer a levée en masse would be declared, requiring all unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to register for military service. The struggle for power between the Girondins and the Mountain reached its climax at the beginning of June: after the Convention was besieged by a huge and heavily armed mob, Brissot and the other Girondin leaders were expelled and placed under house arrest. One by one, the remaining uncommitted deputies fled Paris, leaving the Convention in the hands of the Mountain. The assassination of Marat on 13 July provided a pretext for further purges, consolidating the Jacobin hold on the machinery of government. A Law of Suspects ordered the immediate arrest of anybody against whom there was even a suspicion of political disloyalty. Emergency powers gave Revolutionary committees throughout France the power of life and death. The accused were tried and condemned in groups. Pity for the criminal was itself proof of treason. The pace of executions accelerated. The Terror had begun.

We can only speculate how much of this reached Wordsworth at the time, and how he reacted. Developments in France were reported in detail in the English newspapers; the war gave them added relevance. It is hard to imagine that he would not have followed the news from France closely. The eclipse of the Girondins must have affected him, especially as he was acquainted with some of those men now outlawed or imprisoned. On 13 July his Orléans landlord, M. Gellet-Duvivier, was guillotined; if Wordsworth heard about this, it would have seemed to him that the Terror was closing in. Annette’s family were (regrettably) royalists; would they be safe?* Already torn by a conflict of loyalties, Wordsworth had more and more reason to be anxious about the direction events were taking. He had given his heart to the Revolution; now perhaps he was beginning to experience the torment of doubt. Meanwhile change at home seemed further away than ever. The harsh sentences dealt to those convicted of sedition silenced reformers and radicals alike. Fear of prosecution deterred Wordsworth from expressing the emotion raging within him. It was understandable that he should seek to escape from his thoughts, to find relief

… by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led; more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved …

Around the end of July Wordsworth and Calvert crossed from the Isle of Wight to the mainland, and continued in a whiskey (a form of open carriage) towards Salisbury, intending to go on in the same way towards Wales and then up along the border to Chester; but the horse drawing them ‘began to caper in a most dreadful manner’, and dragged them into a ditch, damaging the vehicle beyond repair. Though neither man was injured, a decision was taken not to continue together – most probably for practical reasons. Calvert may have given Wordsworth some money for his journey; he then mounted his horse and rode off into the north, leaving Wordsworth to proceed, as Dorothy put it, supported by his ‘firm friends, a pair of stout legs’. This unexpected parting turned out to be serendipitous, because the impressions Wordsworth received during the rest of the tour proved inspirational. On foot, and alone with his thoughts, he was more responsive to the landscape, and more open to encounters along the way.

His path took him along chalk tracks across the vast plateau of Salisbury Plain, the wind whistling through unending dreary fields of corn, crows eddying in the sky. It was a desolate place, with few trees or hedges to break the monotony; barely inhabited then, but pockmarked with prehistoric remains. As he walked, Wordsworth meditated on the savage past, and on the ‘calamities, principally consequent on war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject’. He imagined a vagrant ex-soldier, caught in the open as a storm began to sweep the Plain, seeking shelter from the driving rain and howling wind among the monoliths of Stonehenge. It is tempting to speculate that Wordsworth did the same, especially as contemporary records describe ‘a storm of extraordinary intensity [that] lashed southern England with hailstones as big as six inches round’.²⁶ But perhaps the temptation should be resisted, because in a letter written many years afterwards, Wordsworth recalled how ‘overcome with heat and fatigue I took my siesta among the Pillars of Stonehenge’, and complained jokingly that he ‘was not visited by the Muse in my Slumbers’.²⁷

If the muse left him alone on this occasion, she cannot have been far off, because another vision came to Wordsworth on the Plain, where relics of the distant past – standing stones, barrows, ancient tracks, stone circles, mounds and hill forts – are more evident than anywhere else in Britain. In The Prelude he tells us that

While through those vestiges of ancient times

I ranged, and by the solitude o’ercome,

I had a reverie and saw the past,

Saw multitudes of men, and here and there

A single Briton in his wolf-skin vest

With shield and stone-ax, stride across the wold;

The voice of spears was heard, the rattling spear

Shaken by arms of mighty bone, in strength

Long mouldered, of barbaric majesty.²⁸

Wordsworth goes on to describe a nightmare of darkness descending (perhaps a lowering storm?), a sacrificial altar lit by dismal flames, and the groans of those waiting to die; followed by a more peaceful vision of bearded Druids pointing with white wands to the starry sky.

From Salisbury Plain Wordsworth made his way via Bath towards the Welsh border, crossing the Severn Estuary somewhere near Bristol and then ascending the Wye Valley. Today, the lower Wye is still lovely enough to stir the heart, especially when sunlight penetrates the woods that line the valley’s steep sides, glinting on the fast-flowing river below. Brooding cliffs tower against the sky. Ruined castles perch high above the gorge. Celebrated for its picturesque qualities,* this was one of the first places in Britain to attract tourists, and pleasure boats plied up and down the river. Its appeal was marred by importunate beggars who haunted the ruins of Tintern Abbey, and a number of ironworks belching smoke into the air, but neither seems to have bothered Wordsworth. Poetic inspirations came to him one after another: the lovely valley itself, Tintern Abbey, a girl he met at Goodrich Castle who became the heroine of ‘We are Seven’, a tinker he met at Builth who served as a model for ‘Peter Bell’. Above all, the river itself:

… Oh! How oft –

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir unprofitable and the fever of the world

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

Wordsworth continued north, reaching his friend Robert Jones’s cottage in north Wales towards the end of August. Here he seems to have paused, in anticipation of an onward journey to Halifax to rendezvous with Dorothy, whom he had not seen for almost three years. ‘Oh my dear, dear sister,’ he had written to her earlier that summer, ‘with what transport shall I again meet you, with what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.’²⁹

William and Dorothy had spent most of their lives apart. After the death of their mother in 1778, Dorothy, then only six years old, had been separated from her siblings and sent to live with her mother’s cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, more than a hundred miles off in Halifax, while her four brothers – Richard, William, and her two younger brothers, John and Christopher – remained with their father in Cockermouth. She did not return for her father’s funeral in 1784, and was reunited with her brothers only in the summer of 1787, after a gap of nine years. ‘You know not how happy I am in their company,’ she wrote at the time to her bosom friend, Jane Pollard. ‘They are just the kind of boys I could wish them, they are so affectionate and kind to me as makes me love them more and more every day.’ William, then seventeen and nearly two years Dorothy’s senior, was due to go up to Cambridge in the autumn. ‘William and Christopher are very clever boys at least so they appear in the partial eyes of a Sister.’³⁰

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.