Bumming and Booing

Letters

Vol. 23 No. 10 · 24 May 2001

From Kenneth Johnston

In his comments on the paperback version of my book The Hidden Wordsworth, John Mullan (LRB, 5 April) reopens the matter of Wordsworth's possible connections – as target or as agent – to British security operations in the late 1790s.

First, Mullan wonders why I have not toned down my allegations that Wordsworth was a spy more than I have, in light of Michael Durey's report that the 'Mr Wordsworth' in the Home Secretary's paybook was Robinson Wordsworth, the poet's cousin, not the poet himself. I dropped the melodramatic word 'spy' from the title of the paperback, but Mullan seems to have forgotten that the paybook reference is not the only connection between Wordsworth and the Home Office. In July 1797, the Home Office's top field agent, James Walsh, reported from Somerset to John King, his superior in Whitehall, that among the suspicious persons he had observed in Nether Stowey there was one 'Wordsworth, a name I think known to Mr Ford'. King and Richard Ford were the liaison officers linking the Home Office and the Foreign Office, and Wordsworth was already 'known' to them, as was his house guest, John Thelwall, the leading radical orator and journalist of the day.

I retained the phrase 'our man in Somerset' as a description of Wordsworth to offset the hoary rhetorical currency of Coleridge's joking cover-up, in Biographia Literaria (1817), that Walsh overheard them talking about Spinoza and reported it back to Whitehall as 'Spy Nozy'. Walsh did no such thing; his trip to Somerset was neither a joke nor a mistake. His report on what he found – 'a mischievous gang of disaffected Englishmen' – was basically accurate, but the Government took no further action because they were more concerned about French spies preparing the ground for another invasion, and because they already knew all they needed to know about Wordsworth and Thelwall.

Second, Michael Durey did not 'show', as Mullan maintains, that the Frenchman called De Leutre with whom Wordsworth and Coleridge travelled to Germany in September 1798 was an English agent rather than a French spy. Instead, Durey simply confirmed what I had already claimed: that De Leutre was an agent, though for which government is hard to say. And the fact remains that Wordsworth was closeted with De Leutre for the trip from Yarmouth to Cuxhaven, and that he and Dorothy shared lodgings with him (apart from Coleridge) their whole time in Hamburg. All innocent coincidences? Maybe; maybe not.

The point of all the indications in my book of a 'hidden' Wordsworth is not to engage in a sensationalistic exposé of his 'juvenile errors', as he mildly called them. Rather, it is to indicate the costs of the creation of the poet we admire today, costs both to himself and, frequently, to his closest friends and members of his extended family. For example, the fact that Wordsworth's cousin rather than Wordsworth himself was in the employ of the Home Office does not necessarily warrant Mullan's (and Durey's) assumption that the paybook entry therefore had 'nothing to do with the poet'. A significant chapter in Wordsworth family history could be written on how Robinson found himself doing the Government's dirty work rather than enjoying the emoluments of a cushy Church of England curacy. The reasons for this include William's spending (and not repaying) advances from his entailed inheritance at Cambridge and abroad. These reasons were strong enough to induce Robinson's mother finally to sue the estate, which was managed by her brothers-in-law (Wordsworth's uncles), to recover the funds due to her son, but by then it was too late for him to attend university. Had he been able to, he might have been able to take up the curacy which another uncle, John Robinson, the leading Government fixer of the day, twice offered William, but which he refused, a gesture at once so lofty and desperate it can properly be called 'romantic'. When he later changed his mind because he needed money to marry Annette Vallon and provide for their daughter, his reasons were unacceptable to his uncles. In the meantime, John Robinson had found Robinson Wordsworth a job in Customs. It was in this position that he helped arrest two individuals accused of treason, resulting in the expenses for which he was reimbursed by the Home Secretary. All of this means that it is possible to speak of a 'Wordsworthian connection' with the Home Office, even though its full extent remains unclear.

In this regard, I must confess my puzzlement over Mullan's 'consternation' at my 'dizzy' claim that the study of Wordsworth today requires more speculation as well as more facts. Is there something wrong with speculation? Speculation is simply a kind of thinking. Facts without thought are nothing; indeed, without some prior speculation, there are no facts, properly speaking. For example, Mullan finds it strange that Dorothy wore the wedding ring the night before her brother William married Mary Hutchinson. So do I: strange enough to require some speculation, without pretending to provide the definitive answer.

Kenneth Johnston
Indiana University<br />Bloomington, Indiana