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Home , Dorothy Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes

rrJorothy Wordsworth

(1771-1855)

Only in the twentieth century has the literary production of Dorothy Words­ worth become widely known. During her lifetime, readership of her journals and poems was, with few exceptions, confined to those within her intimate circle of family and friends. Only five of her poems were published during her lifetime, all anonymously in collections by her brother, William; never­ theless, she was from the beginning an important literary influence: aspects of her style and many of her ideas and images, both from written work and conversation, found their way into the writings of and . Born on Christmas Day, 1771, Dorothy was the third child and only daugh­ ter of Ann Cookson and John Wordsworth, attorney to Sir James Lowther, . After her mother died in 1778, six-year-old Dorothy was separated from her siblings and sent to live in Halifax, Yorkshire, with her mother's cousin Elizabeth Threlkeld. ''.Aunt Threlkeld," as Dorothy called her, gave the little girl a loving home in a household of six children, the others from ten to seventeen years old. As the youngest, Dorothy was the favorite. The Halifax Old Subscription Library was housed for some years in Elizabeth Threlkeld's haberdashery shop, and Threlkeld, whom Dorothy came to idol­ ize, taught her an early love of reading as well as skill in cooking, sewing, accounting, and general household management. Dorothy briefly attended a boarding school two miles from town in 1781, when she was nine, but then became a day student in Halifax. She attended the Unitarian chapel regularly with Threlkeld. On 30 December 1783 Dorothy's father died. She had not seen him in the years since her mother's death, but his death was to change her life pro­ foundly. John Wordsworth had died without a will and with a major sum owed to him by Sir James Lowther, who refused to make good on his debt. The executors were forced to sue, but in the meantime far less money was made available for Dorothy's support than had been forthcoming in the past. 824 ~~~~~~~~~~~~-=-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-

As an economy, in May of 1787 she was sent to live for a brief but unhappy period with her mother's parents in Penrith over their draper's shop. Her grandmother found her "intractible and wild." Afterward Dorothy went to live for six years in Norfolk to help care for the growing family of her aunt Dorothy Cowper and her uncle William Cookson. Dorothy and her brother William, who was twenty months her senior, had long dreamed of setting up a household together, and in 1795 they were able to do this at Racedown Lodge, Dorset, near the Devon border. As Thomas DeQuincey later observed, the mission Dorothy saw for herself was "to wait upon him [William] as the tenderest and most faithful of domestics; to love him as a sister; to sympathize with him as a confidante; to counsel him as one gifted with a power of judging that stretched as far as his own for producing; to cheer him and sustain him by the natural expression of her feelings - so quick, so ardent, so unaffected-upon the probable effect of whatever thoughts, plans, images he might conceive." 1 At Racedown Dorothy also cared for the toddler Basil Montagu, and in 1797 she and her brother met and established a close friendship and eventually an intellectual and liter­ ary collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Wordsworths were so taken with Coleridge that they moved to Alfoxden House in Somerset to be near him in Nether Stowey; Dorothy kept a journal now referred to as the Alfoxden Journal, from 20 January to 22 May 1798, a period of great poetic creativity in the household. DeQuincey describes her at this time as "too ardent and fiery a creature to maintain the reserve essential to dignity; and dignity was the last thing one thought of in the presence of one so artless, so fervent in her feelings, and so embarrassed in their utterance-"; he also recalls her "originality and native freshness of intellect, which settled with so bewitching an effect upon some of her writings, and upon many a sudden remark or ejaculation, extorted by something or other that struck her eye, in the clouds, or in colouring, or in accidents of light and shade, of form, or combination of form." 2 Coleridge referred to her as Wordsworth's "exquisite Sister" and described "her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature­ and her taste a perfect electrometer-it bends, protrudes, and draws in at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults." 3 William said of Dorothy:

She, in the midst of all, preserv'd me still A Poet, made me seek beneath that name My office upon earth, and no where else. 4

r. Tait's Edinburgh Magazine 6 (1839): 252. 2. Ibid., 251, 253. 3. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford, 1985), 65. 4. (London, 1850), bk. II, lines 346-48. Dorothy Wordsworth

After a dispiriting winter in Germany, Dorothy and William returned to the , to , , in 1799. There on 14 May 1800 Dorothy began another journal "because I shall give William pleasure by it." 5 In later years she explained her own apparent lack of poetic ambition: - I reverenced the Poet's skill, And might have nursed a mounting Will To imitate the tender Lays Of them who sang in Nature's praise; But bashfulness, a struggling shame A fear that elder heads might blame -Or something worse-a lurking pride Whispering my playmates would deride Stifled ambition, checked the aim If e'er by chance "The numbers came" 6 Even so, many modern readers have been struck by the poetic nature of Dorothy Wordsworth's prose in her Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. Indeed, in her later journals she experiments by arranging passages in verse form. But as Susan Levin points out, Dorothy would not have thought of these passages as poems. And William's patronizing attitude toward women poets also played a part in her decision to turn her own talents largely to prose. Just as William criticized Felicia Hemans for being "totally ignorant of house­ wifery;' Dorothy shows her own anxiety about female authorship when, for example, she lauds Joanna Baillie for being not simply a "literary Lady" but a person devoted to her home.7 But in 1940 Hyman Eigerman published short passages from Dorothy Wordsworth's journals arranged in verse form to show that in such a format they resembled imagist poems. Read in this way, Dorothy Wordsworth seems to anticipate by many years the work of Wallace Stevens, Baudelaire, and Ezra Pound. Writing was not only an essential part of Dorothy Wordsworth's everyday life; it was crucial to her self-definition. Clearly, from the start she envisioned that her own literary production would contribute to the household she and William planned to set up, for her Aunt Rawson remarked disapprovingly, "Dorothy and Wm. have now a scheme of living together in London, and maintaining themselves by their literary talents, writing and translating .... We think it a very bad wild scheme." 8 William Wordsworth's own poetry

5.Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2 vols. (London, 1952), l :37. 6. "Irregular Verses;' lines 60-69; the entire poem appears in Susan Levin, Dorothy Words­ worth and (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), 202-3. 7. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth, 155-56. 8. Ibid., 58. Dorothy Wordsworth became simpler, more concrete, less traditional, and less ornate after he began living with his sister. That is to say, his style came more to resemble her own. Although Dorothy's work rem~ined, for the most part, unpublished during her lifetime, she was an active participant in the collaboration that led to the publication in 1798 of the , by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both for this project and on other occasions, the two male poets mined her journal for poetic images and ideas and liberally borrowed from her verbal observations of the natural world. For both men, she was a sounding board, a critic, an amanuensis, and a significant literary influence. In August 1802 the Wordsworths visited France, and in Paris Dorothy met William's French daughter, Caroline, now nine years old, and her mother, Annette Vallon, from whom William had been separated by political events. Dorothy kept her journal during the trip, but as part of the conspiracy of silence William imposed on this chapter of his life, she omitted the month in Paris. The Grasmere Journal ends on 16 January 1803, not long after William's marriage on 4 October 1802 to Dorothy's friend Mary Hutchinson, an event of such import in her life that Dorothy was unable to bring herself to attend. But Dorothy remained in the household, continuing to play a crucial part in William's life. Eventually she was to become a second mother to William and Mary's five children. Was William and Dorothy's relationship an incestuous one? Certainly some of their neighbors thought so, and many modern commentators have voiced similar suspicions. Clearly their relationship was closer and emotion­ ally more intense than is usual between sister and brother. But whether that bond was physically consummated is something we may never know for certain. It is, however, unlikely to have been. And perhaps Coleridge was responding to such rumors when he said of Dorothy,

In every motion her most innocent soul Outbeams so brightly, that who saw would say, Guilt was a thing impossible to her- 9

In 1803 Dorothy made a tour of Scotland with her brother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meeting along the way. After the fact, to share the experience with friends, Dorothy wrote Recollections of a Tour Made in Scot­ land; by May 1805 she had produced a complete draft, which she revised and added to in early 1806. Thomas DeQuincey maintained that this book was "in very deed a monument to her power of catching and expressing all the hidden beauties of natural scenery with a felicity of diction, a truth, and strength,

9. See Gittings and Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth, 65. For a discussion of local rumors of incest between Dorothy and William, see ibid., 105. Dorothy Wordsworth that far transcend Gilpin, or professional writers on those subjects .... This book ... is absolutely unique in its class." 10 On 5 February 1805 Dorothy's younger brother John, captain of an East India ship, drowned in Weymouth Bay. To lift her despondency she began riding a pony, and in November she took a week's riding excursion with William in the countryside around Ullswater. William mined the short journal she kept and later used some of her prose passages in his (1822). In March 1808, when her neighbors George and Sarah Green perished in a snowstorm, Dorothy wrote a narrative account of their deaths and the courage of their children to help raise money for their relief. Although it circulated in manuscript at the time, it was not published until 1936. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote some of what she considered verse-short rhymed, metrical pieces-for the children in her household, for female friends, in letters, and in literary albums and commonplace books. "An Ad­ dress to a Child in a High Wind" and "To My Niece Dorothy, a Sleepless Baby,'' were probably composed between 1805 and 1807; they were published anonymously, along with Dorothy's "The Mother's Return,'' with William's poems of 1815. William took the liberty of altering the original names and titles to distance the world of Dorothy's poems from his own world. For example, in ''An Address to a Child in a High Wind" he changed Dorothy's "Johnny,'' a reference to his own son, John Wordsworth, to "Edward"; and "To My Niece Dorothy" became in his hands the more generalized "A Cottager to Her Infant." Moreover, in his published version of the latter poem William added two stanzas that interject into the poem the issue of social class. Tell­ ingly, in the Rydal notebook Dorothy vigorously crossed out these additional stanzas.11 After the volume appeared, wrote William, "We were glad to see the poems by a female friend. The one of the wind is masterly, but not new to us. Being only three [poems], perhaps you might have clapt a D. at the corner and let it have past as a print[e]rs mark to the uninitiated, as a delightful hint to the better-instructed." 12 In r8ro William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a serious falling out. As a result, Dorothy did not see her close friend Coleridge for the next decade. She converted to orthodox Christianity in l8II, a faith sorely tested when two of the Wordsworths' children died the following year. The household moved to in May 1813, where Dorothy, William, and Mary would spend the remainder of their lives. Dorothy climbed Scafell

ro. Tait's Edinburgh Magazine 6 (r839): 253- I I. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth, II5. I2. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs Jr., 3 vols. (Ithaca, 1975-78), 3 :r4r. Dorotby Wordsworth

Pike with a friend and guide in 1818 and wrote an account of her experience. William revised the piece and published it in his Guide to the Lakes (1822) as an "extract from a letter to a Friend." From July to November 1820 Dorothy traveled with William and Mary and another couple through France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, taking in the Alps; from April to August 1821 Dorothy wrote a journal of the tour, which she recopied in October. In the fall of 1822 she took a seven-week trip to Scotland with Joanna Hutchinson, and in hopes of making money for a future journey, she revised her Recollections of her first Scottish trip after Samuel Rogers suggested publication. This work was not published until 1874, when the 1806 version, not the revised version, was published. Her journal entries from 1824 to 1833 were sparse. In 1828 she traveled to the Isle of Man with Joanna Hutchinson and her brother Henry. In April of that year, while keeping house for a nephew in Leicestershire, she was overcome by a severe gallstone attack from which she never fully recovered. She was seriously ill again in December 1831, and around this time she began taking laudenum regularly for pain. She had another relapse in 1833. In 1832 Dorothy composed "Loving and Liking. Irregular Verses Addressed to a Child," pub­ lished by William in his Poems (1836). Another of her poems, "The Floating Island at Hawkshead," appeared in William's 1842 collection, the author now identified as "D.W." In 1835 Dorothy began to show signs of the presenile dementia from which she would suffer for the two decades preceding her death on 25 January 1855. During this twenty-year period she was lovingly cared for by William and Mary. Lucid at intervals, she was sometimes able to write short letters. She also accurately recited long passages of verse and obsessively made copies of her own poetry.

MAJOR WORKS: Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803, ed.]. C. Sharp (Edin­ burgh, 1874); George and Sarah Green. A Narrative, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 19 36); Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. The Alfox den Journal, 1798. The Grasmere Journals, 1800-1803, ed. Mary Moorman (London, 1971); The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1978-93).

TEXTS USED: Texts of "An Address to a Child in a High Wind" and "To My Niece Dorothy" from Susan Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (New Brunswick, NJ., 1987), 179-80. Dorothy Wordsworth

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An Address to a Child in a High Wind

What way does the wind come? what way does he go? He rides over the water and over the snow, Through the valley, and over the hill And roars as loud as a thundering Mill. He tosses about in every bare tree, As, if you look up you plainly may see But how he will come, and whither he goes There's never a Scholar in England knows.

He will suddenly stop in a cunning nook And rings a sharp larum: - but if you should look IO There's nothing to see but a cushion of snow, Round as a pillow and whiter than milk And softer than if it were cover'd with silk.

Sometimes he'll hide in the cave of a rock; Then whistle as shrill as a buzzard cock; - But seek him and what shall you find in his place Nothing but silence and empty space Save in a corner a heap of dry leaves That he's left for a bed for beggars or thieves.

As soon as 'tis daylight tomorrow with me 20 You shall go to the orchard & there you will see That he has been there, & . made a great rout, And cracked the branches, & strew'd them about: Heaven grant that he spare but that one upright twig That look'd up at the sky so proud & so big All last summer, as well you know Studded with apples, a beautiful shew!

Hark! over the roof he makes a pause And growls as if he would fix his claws Right in the slates, and with a great rattle 30 Drive them down like men in a battle. - But let him range round; he does us no harm

IO larum] Tumultuous noise. Dorothy Wordsworth

We build up the fire; we're snug and warm, Old Madam has brought us plenty of coals And the Glazier has closed up all the holes In every window that Johnny broke And the walls are tighter than Molly's new cloak.

Come, now we'll to bed, and when we are there He may work his own will, & what shall we care. 40 He may knock at the door-we'll not let him in May drive at the windows-we'll laugh at his din Let him seek his own home wherever it be Here's a canny warm house for Johnny and me. (wr. 1806; pub. 1815)

To My Niece Dorothy,* a Sleepless Baby

The days are cold; the nights are long The north wind sings a doleful song Then hush again upon my breast; All merry things are now at rest Save thee my pretty love!

The kitten sleeps upon the hearth; The crickets long have ceased their mirth There's nothing stirring in the house Save one wee hungry nibbling mouse IO Then why so busy thou?

Nay, start not at that sparkling light 'Tis but the moon that shines so bright On the window-pane bedropp'd with rain Then, little Darling, sleep again And wake when it is Day. (wr. c. 1805 to 1807; pub. 1815)

•Mary and William Wordsworth's daughter Dorothy (1804-47), later known as Dora to avoid confusion with her aunt.

43 canny) Snug.