Was Wordsworth a dandy? In Germany late in 1798, according to his sister, he went out ‘walking by moonlight in his fur gown and a black fur cap in which he looks like any grand Signior’. The gown was green, ‘lined throughout with Fox’s skin’. At other moments he would appear in ‘a blue spencer’, a short double-breasted overcoat without tails, and a new pair of pantaloons. Perhaps one can see in this elegance and this air of distinction, this distance from mud and toil, a picture of the man who was living in Racedown and considering his position as an un-acknowledged legislator of the world, preparing to convey to that world his vision of completeness and authority. ‘The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth …’, he would write a year or two later. There is no retreat in those magnificent words to a cosy provincial irrelevance. The ambition is explicitly imperial. Here is a man who wanted to establish a form of poetry whose ligatures would bind up the whole of existence.
His sister Dorothy, part-hidden, is at the centre of this year. There is a surviving silhouette of her: small and bright, sharp, attentive, slight-bodied. Her hair is bound up, her whole being taut. A high lace collar, curly hair on her brow. Delicate, poised, a small bosom, half-open lips, drawn in this silhouette with all the expectations of femininity, her presence almost toylike, but nothing skittish or girlish: careful, exact, intelligent, enquiring.
Coleridge described her in a letter written a few weeks after he had arrived at Racedown:
Wordsworth & his exquisite Sister are with me – She is a woman indeed! – in mind, I mean, & heart – for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary – if you expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty! – But her manners are simple, ardent, impressive –
Above all they noticed each other’s eyes. Hers were ‘watchful in minutest observation of nature – and her taste a perfect electrometer – it bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties & most recondite faults’. His were large and grey, lit and sparkling when animated, sometimes half-absent, as if he had sunk a quarter of an inch below the surface of the skin, but otherwise rolling bright towards you, as if the sight within them were not a receptive faculty but active, coming and reaching out to grasp his hearers. The lower part of his face could look somehow unbuttoned. His mouth was always hanging half open – he couldn’t breathe through his nose. ‘I have the brow of an angel, and the mouth of a beast,’ he used to say, the repeated binary vision of himself, great and weak, good and bad, never ceasing to oscillate between its poles.
She saw a poet in him. ‘He is a wonderful man,’ she wrote to her great friend Mary Hutchinson, who had been staying with them at Racedown and had left only a day or two earlier.
His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes: he is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not dark but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of ‘the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling’ than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead.
In return she sparkled with her own sharp-edged, discontinuous brilliance, a flashing light in her eyes, her mind not a grand instrument of connection like Coleridge’s, nor vastly present to itself like Wordsworth’s, but full of bright remembered visions, exactly recalled, seen in detail: the sky-blue hedge sparrows’ eggs in a childhood nest, the bilberries in the bowl of a black porringer. She had the gift of what Keats would later call ‘that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty’, precise and sensitive, alert to variation. The sensitivity meant, as Coleridge noticed, that her horns would draw in at the slightest touch, and she would easily weep at things seen or remembered. She often felt her heart was full. Her separation from her brothers in childhood meant that she had been ‘put out of the way of many recollections in common’, and that separation only served to heighten the value of closeness for her. She and Wordsworth now shared their everyday life, but they also shared the experience of a mutual absence when young, and then the denial by the Lonsdale estate of their inheritance, the compulsory impoverishment in which they were both now living.
So much had been denied to them, and so much had been broken, that it was her duty to tend to her brother. She was both stronger and weaker than him. He may have been, as he wrote, the mountain and she its flowers, yet he was broken and she was the mender of him. She loved him but she could admonish him, just as later she could tell Coleridge not to publish an unkind review, as it was beneath him and its value as criticism was not greater than its cruelty.
Dorothy on the path of poetry
She saw her own and her brother’s situation clearly enough: ‘We have been endeared to each other by early misfortune,’ she told a friend. Their love may or may not have sublimated the sexual – there is no evidence at all of anything approaching incest – but the form it took was admiration, protection and education, enabling him to leave behind the extremes of his broken self within her shelter and become the greater and more vulnerable poet she believed him to be. He had been addicted to a kind of exclusive masculinity, and only within her care, the shield of her above and around him, could he find the courage to melt and grow.
In The Prelude he said as much to her:
I too exclusively esteemed that love,
And sought that beauty, which as Milton sings,
Hath terror in it. Thou didst soften down
This over-sternness; but for thee, sweet friend,
My soul, too reckless of mild grace, had been
Far longer what by Nature it was framed –
Longer retained its countenance severe –
A rock with torrents roaring, with the clouds
Familiar, and a favourite of the stars;
But thou didst plant its crevices with flowers,
Hang it with shrubs that twinkle in the breeze,
And teach the little birds to build their nests
And warble in its chambers.
Their intimacy was real. ‘Neither absence nor Distance nor Time can ever break the Chain that binds me to my Brothers,’ she wrote. They would wrap up together inside a single coat to stay warm. Her breath, he said, ‘was a kind of gentler spring/That went before my steps’.
Dorothy, or Dolly as she had been called by her parents, loved robins, and there was something robin-like about her: the needle brilliance of their song, their alert restlessness, the tiny, flicker-instant acuity of body and being. She was not sweet in her person, more ardent than that, with a gypsy wildness in her, so that her eyes burned and flashed for almost anyone who met her, like the gold leaf in the electrometer that Coleridge saw.
It was this quality, her ability to respond to the instant, with an immediate attachment to what was in front of her eyes, that allowed her to teach the men around her how to see the world. Joseph Gill’s diary shows that he bought her a notebook when they were at Racedown, but it has disappeared, and there is no written
