On a Monday morning in early October 1802, William Wordsworth married Mary
Hutchinson, the childhood friend of his sister, Dorothy. Dorothy was too
distraught to attend the ceremony. Instead she stayed behind at the
Huchinson farm at Gallow Hill near Scarborough, where she watched from the
window the couple walk down to the church in nearby Brompton. For an hour
she sat quietly, but when the newlyweds could be seen on the avenue
returning to the house, she threw herself down on the bed and lay in a
trance-like state, neither hearing nor seeing, before running down the
stairs, out of the front door and into the arms of her brother.
Earlier that day in the same room, William and Dorothy had performed a private
ceremony of their own. She had removed the wedding ring she had been wearing
all night and handed it back to him. He had then returned it to her finger
before taking it away again to place on the hand of Mary. We shouldn’t know
about this curious scene because although Dorothy described it in the
journal she had been keeping since 1800, it was later heavily scored out in
black. Despite the deletion, done either by Dorothy herself or by William,
or by someone else keen that potential readers would not get the wrong idea
about the relationship between brother and sister, it is still possible to
see beneath their inky cloak the words she wrote and to imagine the pain and
tenderness of their dawn parting.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal was not published in full until 1958.
Since then it has never been out of print. She is rightly celebrated for her
minute descriptions of the natural world, but the theme of her journal, if
journals can be said to have themes, is loss, which had also been the story
of her life. She was first separated from William following the sudden death
of their mother, Anne, in 1778. Dorothy was six, William was seven, and they
were playmates. It was Anne Wordsworth’s dying wish that her third child and
only daughter be taken from their home in the market town of Cockermouth in
Cumberland and be raised by her second cousin in Halifax. The four
Wordsworth sons, Richard, William, John and Christopher, stayed behind with
their father.
Her mother’s death was a devastation that determined the rest of Dorothy’s
life, making unbearable for her any future separations from her home or
family. Dorothy and William were not reunited until the death of their
father in 1787, when Dorothy was summoned to live, like Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park, as a poor relation in the home of her unsympathetic
grandparents in Penrith. Here William would return during school holidays,
and the bond between the siblings was forged. “We have been endeared to each
other by early misfortune,” Dorothy explained to her closest friend, Jane
Pollard. The conversations between Dorothy and William always finished with
“wishing we had a father and a home”. Unable to replace their parents, they
became parents to one another, but they were determined to replace the home
that had been taken from them. After years of wandering, they found it in
the shape of a former inn called the Dove and Olive Bough on the edge of
Grasmere village. “We were young and healthy and had attained our object
long desired,” Dorothy recalled. “We had returned to our native mountains,
there to live.” It was 1799 and here, in Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s most
creative period was about to begin.
Between meeting again in Penrith and beginning their joint life in Grasmere,
Dorothy had become her brother’s muse. She gave him, Wordsworth said in one
of his many poetic tributes to her, ears and eyes; she represented the
essence of Romantic sensibility. Though she has been memorialised as a
sacrificial saint, a woman who lived her brother’s life to the full, this
was not how Dorothy was seen by her friends, some of whom were the best
writers of the age. For Thomas De Quincey, the opium-eater, she was the
“very wildest… person I have ever known”; fervent, sensual, more alive than
most; so quick was she in her speech and movements that she tripped and
stammered over her words and fell forward in her walk. While other women
were fainting with exhaustion after a journey down the garden path, Dorothy
was braving mountain glaciers in her home-made shoes, lying under the stars
on Grasmere Vale, watching the shifting shapes of the night sky, and writing
out hundreds and thousands of William’s sublime words. She was, for the few
years she and her brother lived alone together, unlike any other woman of
her age; she had traded a life of calling cards and courtship to play her
part in a poetic odyssey with an unemployed radical who had fathered an
illegitimate child in Revolutionary France; her relations, who considered
William the black sheep of the family, were not pleased with Dorothy’s
choice.
William and Dorothy failed to see how comic they seemed to the villagers. “Mr
Wordsworth went bumming and booing about,” recalled one local of
Wordsworth’s compositional walks, “and she, Miss Dorothy, kept close behint
him, and she picked up the bits as he let ’em fall, and tak ’em down, and
put ’em on paper for him.” If Dorothy is regarded now as a peripheral figure
in Wordsworth’s life, it is because wandering lonely as a cloud increasingly
suited his idea of what the image of a poet should be. As it was, Wordsworth
was rarely, if ever, alone. Without Dorothy beside, or behind, him, it is
doubtful he would have written at all.
She was never beautiful. Her extreme thinness, weathered skin, the effect of a
lifetime of weekly, sometimes daily, migraines and the gradual loss of her
teeth meant that she aged prematurely, looking 20 years older than she was.
It was her energy rather than her appearance that appealed, and in
particular her responsiveness that was valued and praised.
Dorothy’s journal contains a record of her responsiveness and sympathising
attention. She writes her first entry on the day that William, with their
younger brother John, leaves Dove Cottage in order to visit Mary in Gallow
Hill. Presumably, although Dorothy never says so, the purpose of William’s
trip is to propose marriage. One chapter of her life is about to close while
another opens: even if she continues to live with her brother and his wife,
Dorothy will no longer be the mistress of the house, or William’s soul
companion. Her happiest years are soon to be over, but in her journal she
will collect together its elements; her descriptions of her world – “the
valley all perfumed with gale & wild thyme, the woods about the waterfall
veined with rich yellow broom” – will make it motionless and defend it from
change.
When we first meet her, Dorothy is sitting on a stone by the shores of
Windermere. She is crying. “May 14th 1800. Wm & John set off into Yorkshire
after dinner at ½ past 2 o’clock – cold pork in their pockets. I left them
at the turning of the Low-wood bay under the trees. My heart was so full
that I could hardly speak to W when I gave him a farewell kiss. I sat a long
time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, & after a flood of tears my
heart was easier.” By the time she returns home that evening, with a bad
headache, she has determined to keep a written account of her time alone,
“because I will not quarrel with myself and because I shall give William
pleasure by it when he comes home again”. By keeping a journal of how
abandoned she feels when he is with Mary, Dorothy peppers a little pain into
the pleasure she wishes William to have.
But there is a great deal in her journals that would have pleased him. The
quickly scribbled pages describe, in exquisite prose, a routine of mutton
and moonscapes, walking and headaches, pie-baking and poem-making. They
catch the sights and sounds which other eyes and ears miss; the silence of
winter frost on bare trees, the glitter of light on a sheep’s fleece. She
sketches the ordinary as well as the extraordinary: Coleridge arriving at
midnight, weighed down by books; the travellers who beg at their door; the
swallows who nest at her window; William digging a path through the snow to
the “necessary”, or being interrupted from a poem by the arrival
of dung for the garden which needed to be spread. Wordsworth read what
Dorothy wrote, at times using her very words – such as her description of
daffodils dancing and reeling by the lakeside – for his own poems.
Did he read her description of the wedding morning? If so, how different he
would have found this passage from the rest of the journal. For the previous
two-and-a-half years Dorothy has recorded what she sees, but she now records
what she feels about something she has not seen. Here, in full, is her
response to her brother’s nuptials: “On Monday 4 October 1802, my brother
William was married to Mary Hutchinson. I slept a good deal of the night and
rose fresh and well in the morning. At a little after 8 o’clock I saw them
go down the avenue towards the Church. William had parted from me upstairs.
I gave him the wedding ring – with how deep a blessing! I took it from my
forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it
again onto my finger and blessed me fervently. When they were absent my dear
little Sara [Hutchinson, sister of the bride] prepared the breakfast. I kept
myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk,
coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer and threw myself
on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything,
till Sara came upstairs to me and said, ‘They are coming.’ This forced me
from the bed where I lay and I moved I knew not how straight forward, faster
than my strength could carry me till I met my beloved William and fell upon
his bosom. He and John Hutchinson led me to the house and there I stayed to
welcome my dear Mary.”
Most of Dorothy’s journal entries were written on, or soon after, the day in
question but she described the occasion of William’s wedding five days
later, after she had returned with the bride and groom to Dove Cottage. It
is part of a long entry that took in August and September as well, including
a trip to Calais with William to meet his former lover, Annette Vallon, and
his ten-year-old daughter, to tell them that he planned to marry another
woman. Perhaps Dorothy had been composing in her mind all week how she was
going to describe the wedding day, making the above passage a well-crafted
piece of prose. Or perhaps she improvised, the words simply dropping from
her pen without apparent thought. The passage may have taken her an hour to
write, or it may have taken a matter of minutes. She may have exaggerated
her distress or she may have understated it. William and Mary may have been
in the room with her as her quill scratched the paper, or she may have
snatched time alone while they were out walking.
