The Disappointment of Wordsworth’s Letters

Abstract

‘I have long ceased to write any Letters but upon business’, Wordsworth wrote in 1803 to his teenage-devotee Thomas De Quincey, ironically in a letter not written upon business at all. Wordsworth often spoke of writing letters (usually while writing a letter) as though it were the most arduous chore in the world: ‘You do not know what a task it is to me, to write a Letter’, he moaned to Francis Wrangham in 1804: ‘I absolutely loath the sight of a Pen when I am to use it’ (EY p. 436). He even told Thomas Moore that he took pains to make his letters ‘as bad & dull as possible’ to avoid the ‘horror’ of them being ‘preserved’. Many readers have thought his intention was duly achieved. ‘It is generally felt that his letters are not very good’, said Sara Coleridge (the poet’s daughter). But the letters were published eventually. In 1937, when Ford K. Brown reviewed the first two volumes of Ernest de Selincourt’s editions of Wordsworth’s letters he noted the ‘substantial interest’ they would attract but conceded: ‘it is still true that these letters are disappointing’. Beth Darlington’s fetching edition of The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, published in 1981, warned that anyone looking for ‘sizzling rhetoric’ ‘may be disappointed’. And in the introduction to her Penguin selection of Wordsworth’s letters Juliet Barker felt the need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: ‘It cannot be argued that he was always the most sparkling of letter writers’.