fact is – I do not care two-pence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle I make myself acquainted with.
That June afternoon, Coleridge, with a mind full of every hare in every nettle he had passed on the way, arrived at Racedown, the house in Dorset where the Wordsworths were living. Coleridge famously did not come down the path that led from the turnpike, but across the field, diagonally, over a gate in the corner, and bounding through the corn to the garden where Wordsworth brother and sister were working.
He comes like a comet to their door
It is rather a busy road now, with cars coming fast around blind corners, but Coleridge’s gate is still there, if almost never used nowadays, sagging on its hinges and half-buried in the strands of a hawthorn hedge. Through its straggling opening, one can look down at the house the Wordsworths were living in. There is no access for modern pilgrims, but this is what I imagine: Coleridge bursting down the slope where the corncrakes had been croaking, as they had been all summer, across the green corn that the farmer Joseph Gill had yet to cut or get the men to cut for him. Each blue-green spear standing in that field blazingly alive. The poet’s long leaping footsteps, looping up and over and into the corn, his legs swathed in it and breaking through it, with his bag on his hip swinging up and out at each extended pace, leaving a dragged wake of stems behind him, breaking what had been the perfection of that field, so that afterwards, that evening, looking up at the way by which he had arrived, his mark was there on the country like the tail of a comet or the track of a meteor or the blunderings of a dog in the corn.
The house itself was the opposite of everything Coleridge brought to it. It was a gentleman’s residence, a cliff of brick and grey stucco, sash windows, symmetry, multi-flue chimneys, outhouses, red stretchers with black headers laid in diaper-diamonds across its surface. ‘An excellent house’, Wordsworth called it to a friend; ‘a very good house, and in a pleasant situation’, his sister said. This was no poet’s cottage, and Coleridge casually referred to it in a letter to Cottle as ‘the mansion of our friend Wordsworth’. A tight parapeted formality confronted the visitor. There were two parlours, one with a fine Axminster carpet, one with an oil cloth on the floor, a kitchen and scullery, a pantry, a servants’ hall and a butler’s pantry. Above, four excellent bedchambers looked out over the willows and alders of the valley below the house, each chamber with a closet. There were four further bedchambers on the floor above.
Furnishings were not lacking: mahogany chairs and table, a tea chest and a reading stand, two bookcases filled with the classics and works of history and theology. There was a leather sofa, a pier glass in a gilded frame, a pianoforte, two blue and white Delft flower stands, a well-furnished hearth and a dinner service in Queen’s Ware. Linen sheets were provided, and Betty Daly, at one and a half guineas a year, plus two shillings a week when the gentlemen were in residence, could come in to air and clean the house and do the laundry. Peggy Marsh worked as her maid. Wineglasses, tumblers and decanters could be provided, but these were all to be returned to Joseph Gill, the manager of house, farm and adjoining brickyard, when not required. A picture of Leda, naked with swan, in a gilt frame, belonging to the owners of the house, the Pinneys of Bristol, slave-owning plantation landlords and sugar-traders, was not required by the Wordsworths, and had been packed up and sent away.
It seems in retrospect the most unlikely situation for a man on the lip of revolution, but beneath the surface there is a more complex set of social and emotional conditions in play.
Wordsworth, aged twenty-seven, and his sister Dorothy, a year and a half younger, are borrowing, not renting, the house. They cannot afford the rent, and it has been lent to them by two young radical Bristol friends, the Pinneys, who have not told their far-from-radical father that they have lent out his house for nothing. The Wordsworths are camping here, happy to find a temporary perch in their peripatetic and impoverished life. They are living – or meant to be living – on the proceeds of a legacy which a young friend of Wordsworth had left to him when he died two years earlier. Wordsworth has in turn lent the money out to two other London friends who are meant to be paying him interest – at a handsome 10 per cent a year – but who regularly fail to come up with the payments or are late in doing so. For pin money Dorothy is now making shirts for her brother Richard, a London lawyer, cutting and sewing the linen from a huge bolt delivered to the house, for which she is also hemming sheets.
The Wordsworths in their gentleman’s house have to borrow money from Joseph Gill, the farmer (himself a cousin of the Pinneys, but drunk and disintegrated after a life in the Caribbean), and are given coal during the winter by other neighbours. There is meant to be a gardener, but he is ‘saucy’ and won’t do what either Wordsworth or Gill asks him, so Wordsworth does some of the gardening himself, uprooting hedges, planting potatoes and picking beans. He is, rather to his sister’s surprise, ‘dextrous with a spade’. She hires a boy to mow the lawns. Like the rural poor around them, they eat only vegetables and broth, and drink tea.
‘I have lately been living upon air and the essence of carrots cabbages turnips and other esculent vegetables, not excluding parsley the product of my garden,’ Wordsworth writes to a friend. They buy the worst of the meat at sixpence a pound from a butcher who comes with his cart from Crewkerne, and must depend for their clothes on the cast-offs from Richard in London. At times the whole household falls ill with coughs and colds. They walk everywhere, and the house has a ‘perambulator’, a measuring wheel which can clock off the distances along the road, although, as Wordsworth notes carefully in the inventory, its handle was already broken on their arrival. When the young Pinneys come from time to time, a moneyed interlude intervenes, during which Wordsworth goes shooting and hare-coursing with them and there is wine and meat and gravy, but when the Pinneys go back to Bristol, the austerity returns. Wordsworth must ask Gill to borrow household equipment, one tumbler or four sheets of paper at a time, and Gill carefully records each request in his diary.
Behind this there is a deeper personal history, hinged precisely to the gap between poverty and gentility. The Wordsworths’ father had been law agent to Sir James Lowther, a great landowner in Westmorland. John Wordsworth was a power in the land himself, a coroner worth some £10,000 when he died, living with silver coffee pots and handsome watches, a life lubricated with good port and madeira. He had brought up his children in the most handsome of houses in Cockermouth, with a beautiful garden at the back along whose boundary the River Derwent ran, and the sound of whose water came in through the windows of the bedrooms. But both Wordsworth parents had died when the children were young, the mother of pneumonia in March 1778, when William was seven, their father of a dropsy after spending a night out, lost on the winter fells, five years later. With his father’s death, their world collapsed. Sir James Lowther, soon to be the Earl of Lonsdale, owed John Wordsworth £4,625, but for years the Lonsdale estate refused to pay over the money. The key to the house the Wordsworths had lived in was surrendered to the Lonsdale agent, and the children were dispersed among their relatives, where they were treated as poor relations, humiliated and patronised by the servants and made to feel ashamed of who they were. ‘How we are squandered abroad!’ Dorothy had written of these years.
In 1787 Wordsworth was sent to Cambridge, and encouraged by those relations to think of a career in the Church. But at Cambridge, while ferociously aware of his own great gifts, he had refused to engage with the route required by a conventional career, and had been ‘an idler among academic bowers’. The great emotional and intellectual experience of his time as an undergraduate was not at Cambridge itself, but on a heroic three-thousand-mile walk in the summer and autumn of 1790 through France in the first glow of its revolutionary fever, to Switzerland and the epic landscapes of the Alps. France then was ‘standing on the top of golden hours/And human nature seeming born again’.
After he had left university, with no good degree, he went to London, directionless and unfocused, unable to commit to any life in the Church, the law, university,
