Chapter 1 - Life

Summary

A longing for the company of others shaped Wordsworth's life, one he met by forming a number of intense relationships. These relationships unfolded with friends, most notably the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; lovers, specifically Annette Vallon and Mary Hutchinson; and siblings, particularly Dorothy and John (he was not so intimate with his other two brothers, Richard and Christopher). Born in the Lake District in 1770, Wordsworth's early life was marked by a dependency on Dorothy, to whom he was especially devoted in the absence of his father, who often worked away from home. He was also close to his mother, a figure whom he recalled as a moral and upright influence, balancing his ‘moody and violent’ temperament:

I remember also telling her on one week day that I had been at church, for our school stood in the churchyard, and we had frequent opportunities of seeing what was going on there. The occasion was, a woman doing penance in the church in a white sheet. My mother commended my having been present, expressing a hope that I should remember the circumstance for the rest of my life. ‘But’, said I, ‘Mama, they did not give me a penny, as I had been told they would’. ‘Oh’, said she, recanting her praises, ‘if that was your motive, you were very properly disappointed’. (PW, III.371–2)

Wordsworth's cynicism deepened when his mother died of pneumonia in 1778, and Dorothy was sent to live with his mother's cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, in Halifax.