William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty

Heidi J. Snow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134768202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Exploring the relationship between poverty and religion in William Wordsworth's poetry, Heidi J. Snow challenges the traditional view that the poet's early years were primarily irreligious. She argues that this idea, based on the equation of Christianity with Anglicanism, discounts the richly varied theological landscape of Wordsworth's youth. Reading Wordsworth's poetry in the context of the diversity of theological views represented in his milieu, Snow shows that poems like The Excursion reject Anglican orthodoxy in favor of a meld of Quaker, Methodist, and deist theologies. Rather than support a narrative of Wordsworth's life as a journey from atheism to orthodoxy or even from radicalism to conservatism, therefore, Wordsworth's body of work consistently makes a case for a sensitive approach to the problem of the poor that relies on a multifaceted theological perspective. To reconstruct the religious context in which Wordsworth wrote in its complexity, Snow makes extensive use of the materials in the record offices of the Lake District and the religious sermons and congregational records for the orthodox Anglican, evangelical Anglican, Methodist, and Quaker congregations. Snow's depiction of the multiple religious traditions in the Lake District complicates our understanding of Wordsworth's theological influences and his views on the poor.

Chapter 1 Identifying and Identifying with the Poor

DOI: 10.4324/9781315547091-2

In the index to Pamela Woof’s edition of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, a curious pattern emerges. Under the entry for “Wordsworth, William” and the subheading “Writing,” Woof carefully notes each journal entry discussing William’s work with a poem. For most poems, Woof lists only one entry; for a few, she lists two or three. But for one poem, “The Pedlar,” later to become the section entitled “The Wanderer” in The Excursion and when standing on its own referred to as “The Ruined Cottage,” Woof chronicles eight entries. Woof’s summary of the journal entries, too, tells us something significant was happening with this particular poem:

Pedlar, The, (read, 24; in good spirits about, 50; ill with altering, 58; and tired with, 60,61, 62, 63; got to some ugly places, 65; worn out, D also, 67; W the worse for work, 70; disaster, 73; D re-writes, 74–5; read over and altered, 76; read to C, 81; arranged, D writes out, 280 lines of it, 118).

No other poem mentioned in these journals took such time or trouble. In her notes, Woof explains William Wordsworth’s concern with “The Pedlar”: “The poem was particularly close to W since, as he later told Miss Fenwick, the character of the Pedlar offered ‘an idea of what I fancied my own character might have become in his circumstances’ (PW v. 373): the Poet too loved wandering and observing human life” (214).

In the 1802 manuscript, the connection between the Pedlar and the author seems particularly clear. Crammed into the bottom of one page and the top of the next, five lines appear:

His history I from himself have heard

Full often after I grew up & he

Found in my heart as he would kindly say

A kindred heart to his. His father died

Could never be forgotten.

Could never be forgotten. (MS D, Transcription E, 65–8 and 107, editor’s italics)¹

¹ The numbering of the lines seems to have to do with Wordsworth’s renumbering at a later date. Despite the number of the last line, therefore, the lines do follow one another. Notes the editor, James Butler, “This line is the conclusion of the 19-line insert from the original 1799 copying … into the 1802 work” (footnote page 333).

Wordsworth, of course, had lost his own father, and the tenderness of the last line, “Could never be forgotten,” suggests one source of their “kindred hearts.” In a later version, he removed these lines, perhaps the most personal he ever wrote regarding his father’s death, replacing them with a less heartfelt account:

His history I from himself have heard

Full often, after I grew up, and he

Found in my heart, as he would kindly say,

A kindred heart to his. Among the hills

Of Perthshire he was born: his Father died

In poverty, and left three Sons behind. (MS E, 99–104)

Between the idea of “kindred hearts” and his father’s death, Wordsworth has now inserted “Among the hills / Of Perthshire he was born.” Instead of connecting the narrator and the Pedlar through a shared personal disaster, the poem now relates the two men through their common birthplace among hills. It is this relationship to nature that Wordsworth wishes most to emphasize, not a personal history.

Like Wordsworth, the Pedlar felt the sublime power of the natural landscape as a child:

… He, many an evening, to his distant home

In solitude returning, saw the hills

Grow larger in the darkness, all alone

Beheld the stars come out above his head,

And travell’d through the wood with no one near

To whom he might confess the things he saw.

So the foundations of his mind were laid.

So the foundations of his mind were laid. (MS E, 121–9)

The imagery recalls several scenes in The Prelude—both the skating scene and the boat stealing episode come to mind. It is clear from these lines of intense communion with nature, and the overall atmosphere of the entire poem, that Wordsworth does see the Pedlar as an example of what he might have been “in his circumstances.” But what is Wordsworth imagining exactly? When he says in his comments that it gives “an idea of what I fancied my own character might have become in his circumstances,” to what circumstance does he refer? And why would that circumstance be of interest to him?

The answer may lie in another pattern found in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. Woof carefully annotates Dorothy’s meetings with two categories of people: “People Encountered on the Road” and “Poor People Who Call at DC.” If the entries are organized chronologically, with the Alfoxden entries preceding the Grasmere ones, a distinct pattern emerges. Most of the entries fall before Friday, June 18, 1802—15 for people on the road (all clearly vagrant with the exception of two or three) and 20 for poor people who call at Dove Cottage. Only one entry of either type exists after June 18, 1802. The date is significant: on that day, the Wordsworths received word that the long contested debt owed their family by the Earl of Londsdale was to be settled: “When we were sitting after Breakfast, William about to shave Luff came in. It was a sweet morning he had rode over the Fells. he brought news about Lord Lowther’s intention to pay all debts &c & a letter from Mr. Clarkson” (DCMS 31). It was indeed a sweet morning; the settlement was no small affair. Woof indicates that the Wordsworth family was to be paid £8,500, all in one year (256).² Their circumstances were about to change dramatically. The change seems to have brought about a shift in Dorothy’s attentions towards the poor as well. The poor could not have stopped appearing at their door or along the roads. Conditions in England became worse, not better, after 1802, with the cost of maintaining the poor nearly doubling between 1803 and 1818 (Smith 4). While this change raises some questions about her relationship to the poor, instead of focusing on Dorothy’s attitude after they received word of the settlement, I would like instead to turn to her attitude before this date.³ What was it about Dorothy and William’s condition before 18 June that would make Dorothy note her encounters with the poor in such careful detail? I would argue that it is the same sensibility that makes William struggle with “The Pedlar” until Dorothy’s final journal entry of July 7, 1802 when suddenly something seems to have freed him to write 280 lines (DCMS 31). That consciousness is their identification of themselves as poor; they see themselves in those they pass in the road. That identification in turn creates both a fascination and a fear that manifests itself in Dorothy’s careful notations, in William’s struggles with “The Pedlar,” and, in other of his early poems, in his sympathetic descriptions of the poor.

² Stephen Gill places the amount of the total settlement for the family at £10,388, six shillings, and eight pence, given to them on October 8, 1802. According to my calculations, with five children in the family, the amount per person would be about £2,077 or £4,155 between Dorothy and William. If Woof’s figures are correct, the figures would be £1,700 each or £3,400 for the two of them. ³ I do not here wish to cast aspersions on Dorothy’s lack of interest in the poor after June 18, 1802. In fact, an account record she kept at the back of a journal for 1827 includes an entry that indicates she gave two shillings to the poor. One could find many reasons for the drop in entries—their trip to Calais and William’s marriage to Mary takes up most of the rest of the journal and surely the focus of her thought. However, even in her descriptions of their trip, she does not make note of the poor who must have been along their route.

To modern, especially American, sensibilities, this identification seems a far stretch. Dove Cottage was a two-story house with an ample garden, and Dorothy and William employed two local laborers to help with both the house and the yard. And certainly the Wordsworths understood that their condition was materially different from the destitute who came begging and who were struggling with actual starvation. But as Sarah Lloyd explains, this time period defined poverty more broadly than we might today. “Two definitions predominated,” she notes:

First, the poor were the destitute whose needs for discipline and sustenance were to be addressed either by voluntary donation or through statutory provision…. Second, the poor were a more general category of labourers toiling to create the nation’s wealth. This double definition overlay a tenacious belief in inherited status which underpinned the concept of the genteel poor, those unable to live according to the expectations of their rank. And it tended to supersede a long-established Christian tradition, reasserted by John Wesley, that the poor formed a spiritual category, closer to salvation than the rich and respectable. (115)

Despite Lloyd’s assertion that two definitions are at work here, I see four in her description: (1) the destitute, (2) the laborers who have to work for a living, (3) those who are “unable to live according to the expectation of their rank,” and (4) the spiritually rich but materially poor who are closer to heaven. Of these four categories, Dorothy and William, before June 1802, would have certainly identified with the third category. In January 1795, William’s friend Raisley Calvert had died, leaving William £900. Calvert’s estate paid out the money sporadically (Gill and Wu 84), and by 1802, most of the money must have been gone. Had William received simply the interest at the usual 5 percent rate, the annual income would have been £45. If, as is more likely, the money was distributed to him evenly over the course of the years, it would have amounted to a little less than £130 per year. The only other income he seems to have earned in the meantime was £80 for the sale of Lyrical Ballads (EY 244) and £50 a year to cover Basil Montague’s upkeep as long as he was in their care (Hebron 33). Edward Copeland explains the type of living one could expect on such an income:

£100 a year: this is the lowest income that can support the price of a ticket to a circulating library. It embraces poor curates, clerks in government office (both only marginally genteel), and moderately prosperous tradesmen. It could supply a family only with a young maid servant, and at a very low wage. (135)

In July of 1798, Dorothy places their expenses at £110 for the last year with one servant (EY 197). Yet for some of these years, William and Dorothy had two servants. As Copeland notes, “Numbers of servants mark incomes at the lower levels…. Servants, an unfamiliar reckoning device these days, might be considered as the equivalent of modern household conveniences …” (134). Living at the level at which Dorothy and William were in 1802, it is safe to assume that their money was about to run out if it had not already. Reflecting back upon this period in later years, William wrote, “we had at that time little to live upon” (EY 463). Combining their two settlement amounts, at the usual 5 percent of the day, the interest on the money would give them around £200, an amount that “makes a claim to gentility, but only with the narrowest style of life” (Copeland 135).⁴ Still, it was an improvement to their situation that promised them some stability.

⁴ Copeland’s figures refer to Austen’s circumstances. The calculations here regarding the Wordsworths’ situation are my own.

Most likely, Dorothy and William would have wanted to identify themselves with Lloyd’s fourth category, those who are materially poor but spiritually wealthy. And Bruce Graver has also pointed out William’s desire to identify with the second group, to see his poetry as labor.⁵ One can see, then, that from many different aspects of the definition of the poor, Dorothy and William would have been able to think of themselves as poor, and society in general would have labeled them as such. In this state of self-identification, the destitute who came to the door may have triggered imaginatively both fear and sympathy.

⁵ See, for example, his article “Wordsworth’s Georgic Pastoral: Otium and Labor in ‘Michael’” in the European Romantic Review, 1:2, 119–34, and to a lesser extent in “’Honorable Toil’: The Georgic Ethic of Prelude I” in Studies of Philology, 92:3, 346–60.

One can see this mental state in Dorothy’s journals and both their letters, which describe vividly how the two felt their financial existence to be extremely precarious. At times, they had to borrow money to cover their daily expenses, and they both loaned and borrowed money from Coleridge occasionally. As early as 1795, when Dorothy and William make plans to settle at Racedown, Dorothy articulates the importance of the move in a letter to her friend, Jane Pollard. The move will be good for William in that it will give him a settled place to work,

and on my account that it will greatly contribute to my happiness & place me in such a situation that I shall be doing something, it is a painful idea that one’s existence is of very little use which I really have always been obliged to feel; above all it is painful when one is living upon the bounty of one’s friends a resource of which misfortune may deprive one & then how irksome & difficult is it to find out other means of support, the mind is then unfitted, perhaps for any new exertions & continues always in a state of dependence, perhaps attended with poverty. (WLL / Wordsworth, W and D / 1 / 38, her emphasis)

Having to rely upon others is a mental drain as well as a physical one. It acts in a way that dulls all activity and places one at risk of poverty. Despite Dorothy’s hopes for independence at Racedown, however, their situation did not dramatically improve, and they continued to be in need of money.

In a clear example of the kind of dependence she deplored, in 1801 Dorothy writes repeatedly to her brother Richard asking for ten pounds promised her by her seafaring brother John and payable by Richard. She has bills to pay, and she is anxious about the money. Perhaps the most poignant of Dorothy’s appeals comes in her letter to Richard on June 10, 1802, just days before they learn that the Earl’s debts are finally to be settled. William is about to be married. Though she knows she can count on William and Mary to keep her in their home, she is also acutely conscious of the fact that the home that has been hers and William’s is about to become theirs and that as a single woman, she will be dependent upon their goodwill. She tells Richard that while she trusts her brothers to care for her, she does wish to state her needs clearly:

With sixty pounds a year I should not fear any accidents or changes which might befal me. I cannot look forward to the time when, with my habits of frugality, I could not live comfortably on that sum (Observe I am speaking now, of a provision or settlement for life, and it would be absurd at my age (30 years) to talk of any thing else). At present with 60 pounds per ann. I should have some...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Identifying and Identifying with the Poor
• 2 Cockermouth and the Anglican Orthodox Poor System
• 3 An Evangelical Perspective: Wordsworth and the Problem of Suffering
• 4 Quakers and the Poor
• 5 The Excursion and the Compassionate Community
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index