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Joseph Fawcett and Wordsworth's Solitary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Joseph Fawcett was one of the English revolutionary radicals who provided the intellectual milieu in which the youthful Wordsworth and Coleridge moved and wrote. His name has fallen for several reasons into an undeserved obscurity. He had no biographer among his contemporaries who might have collected pertinent material while it was most readily available. But, at any rate, his ideas could have won only a very small audience in the years immediately following his death in 1804, even before which his reputation was mercilessly dealt with like that of other radicals. Besides, his personal eccentricities threw into shadow the more solid portions of his fame. In spite of the fact that he was the intellectual godfather of two of the leading thinkers of his age, William Godwin and William Hazlitt, the bulk of the literary memorials which they have left of him is slight. We have, therefore, an exasperatingly small body of facts about Fawcett's life, but enough is known about his opinions to give us a fairly distinct portrait of his mind.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1933
References
1 Hazlitt was reported to have planned to write a life of his friend. On January 15, 1806, Lamb wrote to Hazlitt, favoring the prosecution of his supposed design and hinting that Fawcett's work should be better known: “Mrs. H. was naming something about a ”Life of Fawcett“ to be by you undertaken: the great Fawcett, as she explained to Manning, when he asked, ‘What Fawcett?‘ He innocently thought Fawcett the Player. But Fawcett the divine is known to many people. … You might dish up a Fawcettiad in three months, and ask £60 or £80 for it.” (The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, i, 222). But the project never materialized. An extended account of Hazlitt's memories of Fawcett would have done more than can possibly be done now to keep his name alive. W. C. Hazlitt in his memoirs of his grandfather, laments the slenderness of his information about “that excellent and accomplished man.” (Memoirs of William Hazlitt, ii, 240).
2 C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries, i, 17.
3 P. P. Howe, in his Life of William Hazlitt (page 16), speaks of Fawcett as “the school friend of Godwin,” following Hazlitt in his essay on Godwin; but this hardly comports with Godwin's own statement.
4 Holcroft, in making a philosophical point against the insincerity of civilized manners, writes of one of Fawcett's adventures with the philosopher, of which Godwin told him at a dinner in 1798: “Godwin mentioned a Mr.—, whom he and Mr. Fawcett, on a pedestrian ramble, went to visit at Ipswich: Godwin saying that perhaps he would give them beds; if not, he would ask them to supper, and besides they would have the pleasure of seeing the beautiful Cicely, his daughter. They went, stayed some time, but received no invitation. When they came away, Mr. Fawcett said he had three questions to ask Mr. Godwin—How he liked his supper, how he liked his bed, and how he liked Miss Cicely (who had not appeared)? This occasioned me to remark that the fault was probably not in the host but in the hypocrisy of our manners; and that they ought to have freely said they wanted a supper, beds, and to see Miss Cicely.” (Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, pp. 192–193) Fawcett furnished Godwin suggestions for his life of Chatham, published in 1783, and “always spoke of his writings with admiration tinctured with wonder.” (William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, pp. 30–31.)
5 Gentleman's Magazine, February, 1804.
6 See Book vii of The Prelude.
7 Emile Legouis, The Early Life of William Wordsworth, p. 178.
Nor did the Pulpit's oratory fail
To achieve its higher triumph. Not unfelt Were its admonishments, nor lightly heard
The awful truths delivered thence by tongues
Endowed with various power to search the soul.
The Prelude, vii, 544–548.
9 See op. cit., 226.—It has, however, recently been shown that Paine's influence was predominant upon Wordsworth's most outright revolutionary pronouncement, A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, written in the early part of 1793. (Edward Niles Hooker, “Wordsworth's Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff,” Studies in Philology (July, 1931). But Fawcett undoubtedly contributed an ingredient to Wordsworth's thinking between 1791 and 1795.
10 Ford K. Brown has mistakenly left the impression that Hazlitt met Fawcett six or seven years earlier. (See his Life of William Godwin, p. 14),
11 Page 192.
12 Basil Montague, Hazlitt hints to us, was one of the group of Fawcett's youthful admirers. In the days before his conversion to conservatism by Mackintosh, he began his sentences every few minutes with “Fawcett used to say.” (Memoirs of William Hazlitt, ii, 242).
13 Ibid., ii, 291.
14 Table Talk (Everyman's edition), pp. 224–225.
15 lxi (March, 1791), 245–246.
16 I, 422–425.
17 ii, 75.—The Sermons are quoted from the edition of 1801.
18 ii, 118–119.
19 ii, 127.
20 ii, 130–131.
21 ii, 132.
22 Fenwick note to The Excursion.
23 George McLean Harper, William Wordsworth, i, 262.
24 See Book I, Chapters ii–iii and Book v, Chapters xvi-xx, of the edition of 1796; and Arthur Beatty, “Joseph Fawcett: The Art of War, Its Relation to the Early Development of William Wordsworth” in Univ. of Wis. Stud. in Lang. and Lit., no. 2, 227–230.
25 For a list of the writings of these men on the theme of war, see Ibid., pp. 234–235.
26 Ibid., p. 235.
27 Lines 64–70.—I have followed the text as reprinted by Beatty in the article named above.
28 Lines 95–118.
29 Lines 129–249, 823–910.—For example, he calls upon the reader to see fire, among other gifts of nature perverted to evil uses by war, the sun's
… waving work
Impious undo, consume the yellow year,
And beauteous Ceres to a cinder change!
30 Lines 250–318.
31 Lines 319–363.—Professor Beatty has pointed out the similarity between this episode and the story of Wordsworth's Guilt and Sorrow.
32 Lines 364–410.
33 Lines 452–453.
34 Lines 520–521.
35 Lines 1079–1132.
36 Lines 1251–1257.
37 Preface to Poems (1798), page iv. The Art of Poetry appears here in an enlarged edition.
38 Poems, 262–263.
39 Preface to Poems, p. v.
40 Poems, 260–261.
41 Ibid., 264–265, 267–268.
42 Ibid., 272.
43 Ibid., 269–270.
44 Profesor Harper (William Wordsworth, i, 264) conjectures the influence of Louisa, A Song upon Wordsworth's Louisa, written in 1805. Might not also the echo of its tender elegiac note have wrought an unconscious influence upon the Lucy poems, written the year after its publication?
45 Op. cit., 166.
46 In his Lectures on the Law of Nature and of Nations, Mackintosh repudiated his earlier revolutionary philosophy, set forth in Vindiciae Gallicae, his reply to Burke's Reflections.
47 Page 192.
48 Fenwick note to The Excursion.
49 George McLean Harper, op. cit., ii, 408.
50 Ibid., ii, 405.
51 Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, i, 250.
52 Fenwick note.
53 See The Excursion, ii, 164–210.
54 Ibid., ii, 215–226.—This is quoted from the account of the Wanderer, who is, generally speaking, the poet himself. The Solitary gives a fuller account in Book iii, 706–767.
55 Ibid., ii, 234–240.
56 Ibid., ii, 247–272.
57 Lines 768–830.
58 Emile Legouis, op. cit., p. 259.
59 Lines 831–955.—This seems to be an episode manufactured out of imagination.
60 In the retreat of the Solitary, a recess in the mountains between the vales of Langdale, there is nothing to suggest Fawcett's retreat at Hedgegrove. Moreover, Hazlitt gives us the impression that Fawcett was not by any means wedded to solitude.
61 Book iii, 991.
62 Book ii, 311–312.
63 Book ix, 787–789.
64 Fenwick note to The Excursion.
65 See P. P. Howe, op. cit., 175.—Howe assumes that Hazlitt recognized Fawcett's portrait in the Solitary.
66 George McLean Harper, op. cit., ii, 228.
67 Ibid., i, 261–262.
68 Poems, 39–40.
69 Ibid., 48–49.
70 Ibid., 53.
71 Ibid., 97, 101.
72 Ibid., 255.
73 Ibid., 166.
74 War Elegies, pages iii and iv of the advertisement.