Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years by Roe Nicholas;

Author:Roe, Nicholas; [Roe, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198818113
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2018-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

‘Cautious William’: Wordsworth in 1794

On 23 May 1794 Richard Wordsworth wrote to his brother to warn him about the danger of declaring his political views: ‘I hope you will be cautious in writing or expressing your political opinions. By the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Acts the Ministers have great powers’ (EY, 121 n.). Richard had lost no time in getting in touch, for the Acts had been suspended that very day—shortly after the leaders of the Corresponding and Constitutional Societies had been arrested and detained. Dorothy Wordsworth replied, reassuring Richard that she could answer ‘for William’s caution about expressing his political opinions’, and added: ‘He is very cautious and seems well aware of the dangers of a contrary conduct’ (EY, 121).

Five days before, and at the very moment Richard was writing his letter, ‘cautious’ William had declared to William Mathews that he belonged to ‘that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class [would] forever continue’ (EY, 119). To call oneself a ‘democrat’ in 1794 was to invoke a range of progressive opinions. In The Voice of the People, Citizen Richard Lee offered this definition: ‘democrat,—one who maintains the rights of the people; an enemy to privileged orders, and all monarchial encroachments, the advocate of peace, œconomy, and reform.’28 Wordsworth’s opinions in 1794 coincided exactly. On 8 June, he wrote again to Mathews:

I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified. Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species I think must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement: hence it follows that I am not amongst the admirers of the British constitution.

(EY, 123–4)

A year earlier the lawyer John Frost had been pilloried and jailed for expressing similar opinions—while drunk—in a coffeehouse. ‘I am for equality’, he allegedly announced to an informer; ‘I can see no reason why any man should not be on a footing with another; it is every man’s birth‐right…the constitution of this country is a bad one’.29 Wordsworth may well have been thinking of Frost when he referred to the government’s repressive ‘auxiliaries’ of ‘imprisonment and the pillory’ in his Letter (PrW, i. 36). He had decided not to publish his pamphlet, but his 1794 letters to Mathews were much less circumspect about his political opinions; the post was not secure, and to ‘disapprove’ of monarchy, aristocracy, and the constitution would have been sufficient to attract an informer’s attention had his letters fallen into the wrong hands. In his Narrative of Facts Relating to a Prosecution for High Treason, Thomas Holcroft mentioned the non‐delivery of a letter he had sent to his son and daughter: ‘as several of their letters addressed to me have miscarried’, he wrote, ‘it is not improbable that it has already been read, by the agents of ministry’.30 By disclosing his democratic ideas in a letter, Wordsworth risked a similar ‘miscarriage’ of correspondence.

If the ‘agents of ministry’ had visited Wordsworth circa 1794–5, the following matters would certainly have been of interest to them:

1. His acquaintance with Samuel Nicholson and other London dissenters such as Fawcett and Johnson

2.

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