25 January: Boreham on Dorothy Wordsworth

Laureate's Inspiration
Has justice ever been done to the influence upon English literature of Dorothy Wordsworth, the anniversary of whose death we mark today? Wordsworth himself confessed that his sister inspired the best work he ever did. Coleridge as good as said that, but for her, his own "Ancient Mariner" would never have been written. And she profoundly influenced the note of Lamb, Hazlitt, and other contemporary singers. One cannot think of Wordsworth without thinking of Dorothy. She does not immediately strike you as a commanding or an authoritative figure. She is quite short, very slight, and altogether unimpressive. "Her face," her brother says, "was of Egyptian brown." She looked almost a gipsy. She was of quick, nervous movements; ardent and intense; rich in electrical vitality, with wild and startling eyes that suggested that the fire of some intellectual or spiritual passion burned steadily on an unseen altar in her soul. De Quincey says that, in every conversation, she betrayed a sweet and remarkable power of sympathy.

Born on Christmas Day, 1771, she and Sir Walter Scott occupied their cradles simultaneously. But everything went hardly with Dorothy. The environment of her girlhood was as sordid, depressing, and unromantic as it could very well have been. She was condemned to spend her earlier days among coarse and narrow-minded companions, to slave at the most menial tasks, and to listen to a torrent of conversation that never rose above the level of vulgar gossip. Living in those days with her grandparents, the thrill of her girlish existence came to her on the day on which William, having inherited from an admirer a sum of £1,000, sent for her to come and keep house for him.

Both Profit By Companionship
It was the best thing that could have happened—for both of them. In the days of his restless youth, caught in the seething swirl of the French Revolution, Wordsworth was in danger of becoming engulfed in the military and political tumults of that wildly exciting time. It was Dorothy who recalled him to his desk and pointed him along the road that led to destiny. "She soothed his mind," as Miss Rosaline Masson says, "and reawoke his craving for poetic expression."

She, in the midst of all, preserved him still
A poet; made him seek beneath that name,
And that alone, his office upon earth.

Dorothy had many offers of marriage—one from William Hazlitt—but she preferred to remain entirely her brother's. She accompanied him on more than half of his wanderings; she pointed out to him much of the loveliness that he thereupon embalmed in his verses; she suggested to him many of his themes. She had an uncanny perception for the inwardness of things. Her brother saw the outward form of beauty; she saw its secret soul. She drew his attention to it and he straightway set it to music, as he confessed:

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears,
And love and thought and joy.

Those who are familiar with Wordsworth will recognise that, in taking her brother under her wing, Dorothy saddled herself with a stupendous responsibility. In an age in which a poet's success depended very largely on his ability to cut a handsome figure in society, Wordsworth possessed a personality that was altogether uncouth and repulsive. He wore clothes that were positively shocking. His coat was rough, faded and threadbare; his boots were awkward and clumsy. He was a thoroughgoing clodhopper and he was not in the least ashamed of it.

Raw Material and Finished Product
All this worried poor Dorothy to death. She was in ceaseless distress about it. In spite of this, however, her triumph was complete. She may not have transformed her ungainly brother into a courtly knight. But, from the standpoint of posterity, she did something infinitely finer. She held him to his ideals; kept his vision always clearly before him; and made him the purest of English singers. So far from again becoming fevered by the tumults raging around him, he himself soothed and satisfied the troubled spirits of a martial age.

The generation for whose ears he sang was a generation that was distracted by the Napoleonic menace, a generation that was absorbed in the momentous issues hanging upon the fleets that grappled at Trafalgar and upon the armies that fought at Waterloo. To people of fainting heart and maddened brain he sang of the cuckoo and the skylark, of the redbreast and the butterfly, of the rainbow and the daffodil. Under the spiritual spell of Dorothy, he sang, not as an admirer, but as a worshipper. She herself published a few trifles, both in poetry and prose. Her personal contribution to our literature is, however, inconsiderable when compared with the debt that we owe her for her influence on minds like those of Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and her brother. She drew from them the best that was in them, and, as long as letters last, the world will bless her for her pure and priceless ministry.

F W Boreham

Image: Dorothy Wordsworth