Book review: 'William Wordsworth: A Life', by Stephen Gill

by Chris Townsend
 
250 years have passed since Wordsworth’s birth, and 31 years since the publication of Stephen Gill’s account of the great poet in William Wordsworth: A Life. Gill’s book has proved itself to be that rarest of works: both an accessible point of introduction for those with a general interest, as well as the standard scholarly account of his development as a writer. Its appeal to enthusiasts and experts alike has been articulated on this very blog in an excellent review by Anna Mercer.
 
Coinciding with Wordsworth’s 250th anniversary, Gill has revised his book for a new generation of readers, reflecting the latest scholarly understandings of Wordsworth’s life and works. Some of that scholarship is Gill’s own: he is the author of, amongst other works, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (2011), a study of the poet’s practices of revision as well as his images of return in poems like ‘Tintern Abbey’. In the spirit of ‘revisiting’, then, and in the doubled sense of ‘re-view’, let’s open William Wordsworth: A Life and see what has changed.
 
The book begins with a new preface that serves to strengthen a claim Gill made in 1989: that ‘as Wordsworth grew older he became a stronger, not a weaker, power in the national culture’. Certainly, readers today are very often attracted to the period Nicholas Roe has documented as Wordsworth’s ‘radical years’, when in the 1790s, he and Coleridge were at work on the Lyrical Ballads and rubbing elbows with political non-conformists. If the primary goal of Gill’s book is to provide an accurate sketch of the poet’s development as a poet from birth to death, then the secondary goal is to champion the revaluation of the latter years of Wordsworth’s life; little surprise that many of the revisitings of the second edition show their traces there. For instance, there are substantial additions to the last chapter, dealing with the ‘Muse’s visitations’ in the final decades of the poet’s life.
 
These include the poem At Furness Abbey, which Gill discusses in detail as a poem that sees Wordsworth ‘reach into the past’, connecting the boyhood experience of that ‘large Abbey, with its fractured arch’ with his later visit: ‘with fixed eyes admire / That wide-spanned arch, wondering how it was raised’. Notice how that present arch inspires reflection upon its own origin, just as the poet looks back on his own development. These expanded sections also include discussion of Wordsworth’s letters against a railway that was intended to run deep into his beloved Lake District, and a more substantial evaluation of Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842), with a commentary on the volume’s marked sense of ‘finality’ and the inclusion, in that volume, of poems by Dorothy Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson.
 
Following from that last point, a key reworking in the second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life is that the women of Wordsworth’s life are brought into focus more sharply throughout the book. Of note are extensive additions to the section that documents Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy’s reunion after years of separation, and the first period in which they lived together in Keswick. Gill draws on Dorothy’s letters, and on recent scholarly works including Lucy Newlyn’s William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other (2013), to reconstruct in greater detail than before this crucial joint chapter in their lives. What Gill shows us is that brother and sister were of the utmost importance to one another, with Dorothy was sprung from a life of ‘domestic bondage’ into one of freedom, and William feeling mentally liberated, and enabled to turn seriously for the first time to the poet’s task.
 
His relationship with, and praise for, Isabella Fenwick in the latter years of his life is also fleshed out, and includes Wordsworth describing to her Chaucer, who had ‘towards the female sex as exquisite and pure feelings as ever the heart of man was blessed with’ — a remark of such sensuosity that it seems to indicate something of Wordsworth’s own affections for Fenwick.  The composition of the notes Wordsworth dictated to Fenwick on the subject of his own poems — now widely known as the ‘Fenwick Notes’ — is also expanded to include, amongst other things, the fact that Annette Vallon, the Frenchwoman with whom Wordsworth had had an affair and a child in the 1790s, had died the same year as Wordsworth began his notes. The news, as Gill writes, ‘could hardly not have awakened a host of memories’ in the poet, and the convincing suggestion is made that the now celebrated notes were in part a direct response to that death, and to Wordsworth’s increase in thoughts on his own mortality.
 
Along with the new material, there is a greater selection of images to accompany the revised text, and these are printed in high-quality colour where the originals were black and white. They include a marble bust of Wordsworth aged fifty, and one of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s portraits of Wordsworth on Helvellyn, featuring an image of the poet, aged 72, reclining on a rocky outcrop in pensive mood, set against a darkening sky. The image brings into sharper focus the older Wordsworth that Gill aims to revisit, and a further new image by Haydon sits in engaging relation to that portrait. Wordsworth had his life mask made when he was 45, some 27 years before the aforementioned portrait, but by its looks it could easily have come about after. The mask — the creation of which Haydon says Wordsworth bore ‘like a philosopher’ — shares in common with all other life masks the unsettling sense that it could just as easily be a death mask: the still face, eyes closed, could be the deathly subject Wordsworth contemplates as he sits pictured on Helvellyn.

These small-scale, local revisions and revisitings made to William Wordsworth: A Life ultimately cast a subtle but always detectible new light across the work as a whole. Readers already familiar with the masterly first edition of Gill’s work will find intact the story of Wordsworth’s ascendance into poetic greatness in the earlier years with Coleridge; the development of the middle-period style that brought forth poems like the ode ‘Intimations of Immortality’; and his ongoing struggles with The Recluse — as well as his brief stint as Poet Laureate — that marked the latter years. But the increased emphasis on the women in his life, on Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Hutchinson and on the value they held for
 
Wordsworth as a poet, and the further efforts to show his continued relationship with poetry and ‘the Muse’ in the later years of his life, paint a picture of Wordsworth as Haydon caught him: increasingly silent (Wordsworth would call it ‘the Silence of of Age’), occasionally sombre, and profoundly sensitive to his own mortal condition. We see Wordsworth in the serious act of reflecting on his legacy and his life after death — precisely our concerns now on the 250th anniversary of his birth. Gill gives us the Wordsworth who bore life’s tribulations as a philosopher, the Wordsworth renowned as a poet, but also the deeply human portrait of Wordsworth the man.