If William Wordsworth had been born a century and a half later, he would surely have grown up to become an archetypal BBC man. He even went to Cambridge, which would have provided no handicap. The fact that he also made little success of academe probably also fits the mould. He even satisfied the apparent anti-establishment persona of youth followed, still according to type, a conformity of middle age for, after the obligatory fling with radicalism and journeys of self-discovery as a youth, he set about what he regarded as a "breaking of the mould" in poetry. Literature, and poetry in particular, was the mass medium of influence of his day, so attempts to break into popularity were probably as much financially as well as artistically motivated. Again, there's nothing here that diverts from modern BBC-man.
Then, as conformity began to smooth off the radical edges, Wordsworth's apparently common touch reinterpreted his standpoints, transforming them from proto-socialism to the patronising laissez-faire of a man newly but successfully allied with wealth and property.
Hence this proto-BBC man had followed the well-trodden path that secures the progress of the aspirant to confirmed membership of the establishment. Had Wordsworth been born that century and a half later, he would probably have become a household name as a television presenter of idealised rural lifestyles, alongside the presentation of occasional antique market or quiz shows, the type where the presenter has to explain the rules at the start of each and every episode.
He would also, perhaps in his mid-years, have made it into The Sun or The News Of The World. "TV personality leaves secret holiday romance love child with single mum" might have been the headline. And it would have been accurate. It was only in the 1920s that this information about a fling with Annette Vallon in revolutionary France emerged. Caroline, the daughter, grew to a healthy maturity and there remain descendants of Wordsworth in France to this day. It's the sort of thing that the English regularly and admonishingly ascribe to the French, especially poets.
But of course in reality William Wordsworth became almost a parody of himself. Virtually the whole of his life was spent in his Lakeland home. His poetry is a Romantic's internalised response to nature. The cocoon is also extended to his family in that decades spent in the close company of his sister probably perpetuated the illusion of an unchanging household. No wonder the radicalism of youth solidified into a conservatism of maturity and support for a Tory party that perpetuated forelock-touching feudalism. He also managed to maintain a convenient pragmatism that found no contradiction in accepting the fruits of patronage that had ruined the lives of his parents.
William Wordsworth by Hunter Davies is not a literary study. Neither is it purely a biography. What it attempts and also achieves is the description of a life, the interpretation and analysis of motive and the relation between these and the subject's artistic development. Hunter Davies brings events and people to life and does considerably more that catalogue influences and events. William Wordsworth is a fascinating read and a remarkable achievement. It provides a rounded and sensitive but also critical and only partly sympathetic portrait of a truly great artist who laid claim to simplicity amid all the complications and contradictions of life.
Philip Spires
Author of Mission and A Fool's Knot, African novels set in Kenya
http://www.philipspires.co.uk/
Migwani is a small town in Kitui District, eastern Kenya. My books examine how social and economic change impact on the lives of ordinary people. They portray characters whose identity is bound up with their home area, but whose futures are determined by the globaised world in which they live.
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