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SIR WILLIAM WATSON s A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY by Jean Moorcroft Wilson A Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy London University 1969 /n!8L.\ ProQuest Number: 10107276 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10107276 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT In this thesis I attempt to give a full account of Watson's life, since neither of his previous biographers have done so; Walter Swayze ends his examination thirty years before Watson's death and James Nelson deals mainly with his work. But I find his whole life significant, particularly in view of the new material I have discovered. Watson's teenage years in Liverpool, for instance, give an interesting picture of a group of provincial writers who later became famous. His previously unpublished letters to Professor Dowden, his next main influence, are full of useful information on the eighties, and the relative success of his early work reveals more about its prevalent attitudes, especially his political sonnets, which raise the question of nineteenth century political poetry in general. His critical elegy on Wordsworth in 1887 introduces the possibility that he innovated a new poetic form. But it is his entry into London literary circles and rise to fame there in the early nineties that gives the main interest to Watson's life. I suggest that this success shows the strength of the Tennysonian tradition in a supposedly "decadent" age. Drawing on another collection of unknown letters, I then trace his relationship with his publisher, John Lane, and many other well-known figures of the period, as well as his surprising failure to become poet laureate. The decline of his popularity and its brief revival at the turn of the century provides more interesting proof of -2- contemporary poetic taste. So, too, does his rejection of the Georgians a decade later. His increasing obscurity in the twentieth century shows that the Tennysonian tradition was finally dying. I argue, in conclusion, that Watson was one of its last representatives and that his death in 1935 was the end of an age. -3- CONTENTS Page Abbreviations 5 Chapter 1 - Birth and Childhood 6 Chapter 2 - The Liverpool Literary Circle 29 Chapter 3 - 'The Prince's Quest' and Professor Dowden 49 Chapter 4 - First Nervous Breakdown and Epigrams of Art. Life and Nature 63 Chapter 5 - 'Ver Tenebrosum' and 'Wordsworth's Grave' 82 Chapter 6 - Literary Criticism for London Periodicals 109 Chapter 7 - Second Nervous Breakdown and London Life 144 Chapter 8 - The Laureateship 171 Chapter 9 - A Legacy, Marriage and a Scandal 205 Chapter 10 - Drama, First World War Poetry and the Georgians 242 Chapter 11 - The Last Years 268 Conclusion 281 -4- ABBREVIATIONS BOL = The Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds' Library, Leeds. BH = The Manuscript Room, British Museum, London. Bodleian = The Bodleian Library, Oxford. Garnett Collection = David Garnett's collection of his grandfather, Richard Garnett's letters, St. Ives, Huntingdonshire. Poems = The Poems of William Watson, 2 vols., London, 1904. TCD = The Dowden Collection, Trinity College, University of Dublin. UC = The Lane Archive, University College, University of London, Yale = The Watson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book Library, University of Yale, New Haven. -5- Chapter 1 Birth and Childhood John William Watson was b o m nearly halfway through Queen Victoria's reign at the small town of Burley-in-Wharfedale, just outside Leeds. Burley had first grown from a village into a town when William Fison and William Edward Forster began developing mills in the area in 1857. Peel Place was one of the streets "opened up as a site for industrial dwellings" and in the same year Watson's father bought land there and built himself the house in which William was b o m on August 2 , 1858.^ Watson is remembered today by many of the town's older inhabitants as the "Burley poet". Visiting the district in 1966, the first people I spoke to in the High Street were able to direct me to his birthplace and an authority on local affairs supplied me with some interesting details about the Watson family. In answer to my enquiry printed in the Wharfedale and Airedale Observer, a Mrs Emily Brown of Guiseley wrote to say that her great-grandfather, Robert Blakey, had bought John Watson's house from him on March 22, 1861. She herself was b o m there and her description of "the garden with the long stone-flagged table, 1. She Yorkshire Post. April 25, 1930. -6- and ivy growing on the walled garden and old shed at the bottom of the garden, and gooseberry bushes with either plum or pear tree growing up the house side"^ suggests that it was far less depressing than the phrase "industrial dwellings" inçlies* Her great-grand father "was very proud of tbe fact that William Watson was b o m there" and so, too, were Ilkley Urban Council, which has since erected a plaque to him on the nearby drill hall: Sir William Watson B o m August 2nd 1858 Died August 13th 1935 Poet and Humanitarian Was b o m at Peel Place, Burley-in-Wharfedale. Here he spent his youth and gained inspiration from his native dale "To thee what wealth was that the immortals gave The wealth thou gavest in thy turn to men". (Wordsworth's Grave) Local enthusiasm must excuse the slightly exaggerated claim that Watson "spent his youth" in Burley; in fact he passed only the first two years of his life there. Nevertheless, he always remembered his beginnings in the "Yorkshire Dales" with pride. "1 should like", he wrote at the age of forty-six, "to have my 2 connection with those grand parts of England better known". Though he left the north as a young man, there was no doubt where his affections lay: 'The land that lies eastward, the land that lies west. The northland, the southland, which lovest thou best?' 'To eastward, to westward, to southward I stray, ^ But the North has my heart at the end of the way.' 1. Letter to me dated February 14, 1966. 2. Letter to John Lane, November 28, 1904, UC. 3. 'The North Has My Heart', Poems, i, p.94. -7- Watson was also proud of his ancestry, which was as solid and respectable as the time and place of his birth. Both sides of his family for generations back were of pure Yorkshire blood. His father's branch he scarcely ever referred to, but was much more interested in his mother's. He made a special trip to her childhood home of Wensleydale a few years after her death and discovered that she had been brought up mainly by her maternal grandfather, who was of farming stock. "Whether they came from people of more substance and better position"^ Watson never knew, but he did discover that her paternal uncle, George Robinson, was a doctor. Though not able to find his great-uncle's grave in the family churchyard at Richmond, he heard intriguing stories about his son, who lived at Reeth, "where he played the part of the prodigal and wasted his substance, or large part of it, in riotous 2 living". This Robinson's son was still living there when Watson visited the area, but "so reduced in circumstances that though he ^stuck_/to the family mansion . he ^couldn't^/ afford to keep a single servant but j[_did_/ housemaid's work and all the rest himself, and was last seen . wheeling a barrow of manure in his own park grounds!" Watson traced the family back as far as the fourteenth century in ancient records, which showed "Robinsons to have been very much mixed up with ^Middleham Castle^/, the 1. Letter to Lane, November 30, 1904, UC. 2. Letter to Lane, May 28, 1909, UC. —8— chief northern stronghold of Warwick the King-Maker, and where Richard III lived a good deal in his early youth - marrying, of course, Anne Neville, whose father was lord of the place". One William Robinson held the important position of castle-gaoler some time in the fifteenth century. Part of the reason for this obsession with his mother's family may have sprung from Watson's belief, or hope, that they were related to a certain John de Orton who "received a grant of land from Edward I - probably for military services against the Scots - and ^ wht^/ must therefore have been a person of standing some time between 1272 and 1307". He seems anxious to emphasise even the vaguest aristocratic connections and these are all on his mother's side. One passage from a letter to a friend in 1909 shows that he was very sensitive about his predominantly plebeian roots and its defiant tone suggests that this put him very much on the defensive socially: I never visited Askrigg during my parents' life time, but when I first did so, eleven years ago, and looked on it mainly as the place where my mother was b o m when her father (a good Latin scholar and given to writing reams of verse, but always on the brink of perdition) was in the deeps of poverty - when, I say, I first went there, it struck me as one of the ironies of life that I had received that moming an invitation from Lord Rosebery to dine at 38 Berkeley Square - an invitation I declined, being much^too enamoured of the dales to desert them for Mayfair.