The clear shadow
Isabel Colegate
Dorothy Wordsworth Robert Gittings and Jo Manton (Clarendon Press, Oxford £.12.50) Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Selection Edited by Alan G. Hill (Clarendon Press, Oxford £9.95)
The brother and sister stand in the Somerset orchard, she tiny, animated, intense, he long and thin, ill co-ordinated, formidably-nosed, strangely impressive. The pale young man with the high fore- head and untidy longish black hair walks along the road intending to call on them. Seeing them in the orchard, he impulsively jumps over a gate and hurries across a field towards them. 'You had great loss in not seeing Coleridge,' Dorothy writes later to Mary Hutchinson. 'He is a wonderful man.'
One of the merits of this admirable new biography is that by concentrating on Dorothy Wordsworth rather than either of the others it shows us the familiar trio in a slightly different light. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, husband and wife, experienced biographers severally and together, in no way strain the evidence, but they use it in such a way as to bring to life characters so odd, and so intense, that they seem not to be typical of any particular age. They might be there now, in that rather strange part of Somerset within sight of Glaston- bury Tor (though Dorothy was wrong in thinking she could see the Tor from the park above Alfoxton; it was really Brent Knoll). They were so genuinely unconven- tional that they had no idea anyone might think them so. In fact, William was sus- pected of being a French spy because he
walked about at night. Reported to the Home Office as roaming the country bY night and day, and living with 'only a woman who passes for his Sister', he was watched by a detective named Walsh who concluded that 'the inhabitants of Alfoxton House are a Sett of violent Democrats'. De Quincy later wrote that Dorothy was 'the very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have known'. She offended local religious sensibilities by doing the washing on a Sunday, and thought nothing of putting up Coleridge and Hazlitt for the night when they arrived on a day when William was away and she was unchaperoned. Even when the Word worths had been settled for some time la the Lake District where they were endless- ly kind to beggars and travellers of all kinds and full of admiration for the sterling qualities of their poorest neighbours, theY were looked upon with a suspicion which would have astonished them. There were rumours that one of Words- worth's children was really Dorothy fathered by de Quincy, and that Dorothy s relations with her brother were incestuous. This last theory was given credence bY William's habit of greeting her with a kiss when he met her 'on roads, or on moun- tains or elsewhere' — a greeting he ex- tended to many women, whether members of his own family or not. The Gittingses place Dorothy's feeling for her brother 10 the context of her wider and almost as intense feeling for all her family. They als° draw attention to her apparent virtual sexlessness, which was commented on by several contemporaries even before her poor health, and the loss of her teeth, made her look an old woman at 30. At 18, while she still hardly knew the brothers from whom she had been separated since the age of six, she told a friend she had no intention of marrying. She was an ex- traordinarily sympathetic friend to people of both sexes, but the life of selfless devotion to her brother and his family was quite clearly chosen, not imposed on her by circumstances.
Her self-abnegation extended to her own work. When she was urged to publish 'the Grasmere narrative', her account of a local tragedy, she refused — 'I should detest the idea of setting myself up as an Author.' In a letter to her friend Mrs Clarkson, which is included in the selection which Alan Hill has made from his edition of the complete 'letters, she argues that publication might bring harmful publicity to the children of the family concerned. To someone as scrupulous about other people's feelings as she was, this might well seem an adequate reason, but since she knew how high an °Pinion both Coleridge and her brother had of her powers of observation, it does seem strange that in this desperately poor household, whose only hope of earning was by the pen, she never considered Publication of the Journals, in whose pages are so many tiny masterpieces of natural description, as intense in their transfigura- rive power as the landscapes Samuel Pal- mer was to paint not so very long after- wards.
Their poverty did not prevent the Wordsworths from frequently filling the house with guests, often several to a bed. Dorothy and her sister-in-law spent a great deal of their lives in hard domestic labour. There is no record of either complaining; they only regret that the other will do too much. Each domestic joy or sorrow was felt to the full, the deaths of the two Children in particular. The rigid conservat- ism of William and Dorothy's later years, When they had finally achieved financial security, may be partly accounted for not Only by the fact that both aged physically unusually early — in their forties appearing 2. 0 years older — but also by their difficulty in recovering from the death of the second of the two beloved children. Dorothy ever afterwards hated to leave the three surviv- ing children; she wrote of 'my brother's unconquerable agitation and fears when- ever Willy ails anything'. The implacably reactionary attitudes of the later years began to seem not rational so much as fearful, a sort of panic in the face of 'the uncertainty of things'. Dorothy's health, always bad, collapsed totally in her late fifties. By the age of 60 She was senile. The Gittingses append a medical opinion from which it is clear that her life was quite unusually prolonged by the loving care and attention she received from her sister-in-law Mary, and from her °rother until his death. She lived until 14855, sometimes violent, sometimes docile, seldom lucid. Coleridge, wrecked hy opium and estranged from the Words- w.orths, died in 1834, just as Dorothy was slipping into senility. In earlier times they had walked many miles together. 'We lay sidelong upon the turf, and gazed on the landscape till it melted into more than natural loveliness . . . A winter prospect shows every cottage, every farm, and the forms of different trees, such as in summer have no distinguishing mark. On our re- turn Jupiter and Venus before us. While the twilight still overpowered the light of the moon we were reminded that she was shining bright above our heads by our faint shadows going before us.' After this scru- pulous and sensitive biography, Dorothy's shadow is probably as clear as it will ever be. She is revealed as a true original.
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