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The Wordsworth Circle: Brief Biographies Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Romantic Poet, Philosopher, Radical Preacher, Editor, Lecturer and Critic

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The Wordsworth Circle: Brief Biographies Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Romantic Poet, Philosopher, Radical Preacher, Editor, Lecturer and Critic The Wordsworth Circle: Brief Biographies Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Romantic poet, philosopher, radical preacher, editor, lecturer and critic. His most well-known poems include “Kubla Khan” (1797) and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1797-1798). As a critic, his Lectures on Shakespeare (1812) and Biographia Literaria (1817) are highly influential. Biographia Literaria has been considered the first work of literary criticism in English and draws on Coleridge’s knowledge of the philosophical movement German Idealism. Consequently, Coleridge is often credited with introducing German philosophy to English intellectual thought. Throughout his life, Coleridge was a prolific writer of correspondence and he kept notebooks that recorded a range of subjects including natural observations, ideas for poems, confessional outpourings and philosophical meditations. Wordsworth and Coleridge first met briefly in Bristol in 1795. At the time Coleridge was considered a radical by the authorities for his dissenting theological views and anti-establishment politics. Coleridge met William again and Dorothy (for the first time) in 1797 at Racedown, Dorset. A lifelong creative relationship and close friendship began. During the spring and summer of 1798, while living as neighbours in Alfoxden, Somerset, the two poets experimented with poetic form and developed a new expressive aesthetic for poetry. The resulting volume, Lyrical Ballads, was published later that year. In 1800, Wordsworth attached a “Preface” to the second edition which set out their manifesto for this new kind of poetry. Both Lyrical Ballads and the “Preface” are considered to be the founding texts of British Romanticism. Inspiring and critiquing each other’s writings, Coleridge, William and Dorothy spent the next ten years living in close proximity in Germany and the Lake District. After a disagreement in 1810, the friendship deteriorated and the friends never regained the closeness they had enjoyed at Somerset and Grasmere. From his late twenties Coleridge had been increasingly dependent on laudanum (opium), which greatly strained and eventually damaged relations with his publishers, friends, family and children. He had married Sara Fricker in 1795 and was father to four children, Hartley, Berkeley (who died in infancy), Derwent and Sara. Hartley wrote poetry, biographies, memoirs and essays and is gaining increasing recognition as a minor Romantic figure. Sara published translations and wrote children’s verse. Sara edited her father’s works, including the Biographia Literaria, with the help of her brother Derwent. Mary Hutchinson (1770-1859), the eldest daughter of John Hutchinson and Mary Monkhouse. Her siblings were Sara, Joanna, Thomas and George. The family were orphaned in 1784 after the death of their father and went to stay with their maternal aunt Elizabeth Monkhouse in Penrith. Aged sixteen, Mary befriended Dorothy, who had recently moved from Halifax to her grandparents in Penrith, and met William during the school holidays. The two families remained friends. Throughout the mid 1790s, they made a habit of visiting each other regularly at Racedown and Grasmere, and the Hutchinson family farms at Sockburn-on- Tees in Durham and Gallow Hill in Yorkshire. William and Mary married on the 4th October 1802. Together they had five children John, Dora, Thomas, Catherine and William. Three predeceased their parents: Thomas and Catherine died in infancy in 1812 and Dora died of tuberculosis in 1847. Throughout her life, Mary was active in the writing process of Wordsworth’s poetry. She acted as amanuensis for the poet taking down fresh composition which he dictated to her and made amendments to draft material during the long process of revision. She prepared Wordsworth’s poetry for publication by writing fair copies of his revised poems which were then sent to the printers. Her involvement in Wordsworth’s writing process can © Lancaster University be examined more closely on the Goslar to Grasmere website. A collaborative project between Lancaster University and the Wordsworth Trust, the website, presents digitised manuscripts and various drafts of Wordsworth’s Home of Grasmere. Sara Hutchinson (1775-1835), younger sister to Mary Hutchinson. A frequent visitor to Dove Cottage, Sara marked and named the most places in the early Grasmere years: a seat, gate, rock and a point. Meeting Sara for the first time in 1799, the then-married Coleridge fell in love with her. The feelings were not returned and prompted the poet to eventually compose “Letter to Sara Hutchinson” in 1802, revised and published as “Dejection: An Ode”. Like Dorothy, Sara never married. She divided her time between the Wordsworths in Grasmere, her brother’s farm in Wales and staying with family friends. She eventually joined the Wordsworth household permanently when they moved to Rydal Mount in 1813. A valued member of the creative community at Grasmere, Sara, like Mary and Dorothy, would offer criticism on Wordsworth’s poetry. She acted as amanuensis for both Wordsworth and Coleridge. In 1809-1810, Sara helped Coleridge write and arrange material for his weekly newspaper The Friend. As the Wordsworth family expanded, Sara cared for the children as well as helping Wordsworth with the arduous process of revision. Like Mary and Dorothy, Sara aided in the lengthy preparations of volumes for the printers and helped arrange Wordsworth’s Poetical Works, a five volume edition printed in 1827. Such publications became increasingly important as the poet consolidated his literary reputation in the 1820s and 1830s. Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), the closest sibling to William, being only one year younger. After the death of her mother in 1778 Dorothy was sent to various maternal relatives. First, she lived with her mother’s cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld at Halifax, Yorkshire, where she enjoyed a dissenting education. In 1787 she stayed with her grandparents in Penrith for a year before she moved with her material uncle, William Cookson, and his new wife to Norfolk. In 1794, she was reunited with her brother William at Windy Brow, Keswick, and the two siblings decided to live together. Over the next three years, they rented houses in Racedown and Alfoxden before accompanying Coleridge to Germany in autumn 1798. On their return in 1799, Dorothy set up home with her brother in Grasmere at Dove Cottage. As an unmarried woman, she was expected to live with and care for her relatives. In choosing to live with her brother, Dorothy enjoyed far greater domestic, creative and intellectual freedom than she would have experienced otherwise. At Alfoxden (1797-1798), Dorothy kept a journal full of poetic descriptions of the natural world, which were admired by both William and Coleridge. For Virgina Woolf, Dorothy’s descriptions “unfurl in the mind and open a whole landscape before us”. This keen eye for natural detail is further developed in her Grasmere Journals alongside a deep sympathy for others. In a moving tribute to his sister, William credits Dorothy with awakening him to the vitality of nature, claiming “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears”. In the latest biography of the two siblings, Professor Lucy Newlyn describes the emotional and creative support Dorothy lent to her brother: Dorothy was William’s “muse, the first reader of his poetry, his co- writer, editor, and amanuensis, his most attentive critic, and his dearest friend” (xiii). The two siblings shared a mutual creative relationship that influenced both their respective writings. A talented wordsmith in her own right, Dorothy turned her pen to several forms: correspondence, journal, travel writing, prose narrative and poetry. Her travel writing includes Journal of Days Spent in Hamburg (1798), Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803), Journal of a Tour on the Continent (1820), and My Second Tour in Scotland (1822). Moved by the tragic death of two local neighbours and the plight of their orphaned children in 1808, she composed A Narrative concerning George and Sarah Green. Neither the travel journals nor the narrative was published during her lifetime. Instead, they were circulated around close friends. The most well-known of her poems include “Grasmere—A Fragment” (1826-1829), “Floating Island at Hawkshead” (1820) and “Thoughts on my sick-bed” (1832). Even during later life and years of intermittent illness, Dorothy continued to keep a journal. Between 1824 and 1835, she filled fifteen small notebooks which are © Lancaster University collectively referred to as the “Rydal Journals”. These are unpublished and are currently held in the Jerwood Centre. John Wordsworth (1772 -1805), the youngest of the Wordsworth siblings. On leaving school in 1787, John went to sea. He eventually captained the Earl of Abergavenny, which was one of the largest ships to sail under the British East India Company. As a child, he spent time with William during school holidays and saw Dorothy on the rare occasion. He did keep up with the pair by correspondence. However, it was not until January 1800 that he was properly reunited with his two older siblings when he went to live at Dove Cottage for eight months between voyages. There he met Mary and Sara Hutchinson. Towards the end of his visit, William began composition on the poem “When first I journey’d hither” which describes the naming of a local wood after John. The poem cites Nature as the brothers’ guiding force during their years of separation and holds her responsible for the brothers’ shared values. In the poem, William
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