Crabb Robinson's Correspondence with Mary Wordsworth

‘My dearest friend’: Crabb Robinson’s Correspondence 

with Mary Wordsworth

Timothy Whelan

I

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), noted diarist, traveler, and friend of nearly every important literary figure in England and Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century, considered the Wordsworths of Rydal Mount and their relations and friends in the Lake District as his most important social circle outside his own family. His friendship with Mary Wordsworth (1770-1859) spanned nearly fifty years, though initially William and Dorothy were his primary correspondents.[1] After Dorothy’s mental condition deteriorated by the 1830s, however, Robinson transferred his attentions to Mary and the poet. If any letters passed between Robinson and Mary Wordsworth prior to 1833, they are no longer extant, nor are they mentioned in Robinson’s diary. 129 letters, composed between 1833 and 1858, have survived, 83 by Robinson and 46 by Mary Wordsworth. The bulk of their correspondence belongs to the Robinson archive at Dr Williams’s Library, London. In 1927 Edith Morley published the complete texts of Mary’s letters and brief portions of Robinson’s from this collection in her two-volume edition, The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with The Wordsworth Circle (1808-1866). However, 37 letters by Robinson to Mary Wordsworth, now residing in the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere, most of which were addressed to her during the last ten years of her life, are absent from Morley’s Correspondence.[2]

How these letters became separated from the primary Robinson collection at Dr Williams’s Library and thus escaped Morley’s notice is a mystery, but their contents have continued to elude scholars of the Wordsworth circle and Crabb Robinson. Though the publication of Mary Wordsworth’s letters is now complete,[3] scant attention has been accorded Robinson’s letters to her.[4] Scholars have generally relied on Morley’s portions of Robinson’s letters to Mary Wordsworth published in 1927, as well as excerpts pertaining to her from his manuscript diary and reminiscences that appeared in Thomas Sadler’s Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (3 vols, 1869) and later in Morley’s Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers (3 vols, 1938). These publications have resulted in a highly selective and, at times, distorted view of the relationship between Robinson and Mary Wordsworth. From Morley’s volumes we primarily learn about Robinson’s assistance in various matters of business and legal affairs, especially with publishers, on behalf of Wordsworth, and, in a lighter vein, his frequent purchases of candles, soaps, and wedding gifts for Mary Wordsworth and her children as well as her gifts to him of knitted stockings. It is Robinson’s letters, however, far more than Mary Wordsworth’s, that reveal the depth of their friendship and the breadth of their shared and, at times, varied interests in literature, religion and politics, as well as the activities and opinions (both good and bad) of their wide coterie of friends and family members. According to Morley, their correspondence “shows the writers setting down their thoughts and feelings in unrestrained freedom of intercourse” (Correspondence 1:27). This “unrestrained freedom” was apparent to Morley because of her access to their correspondence at Dr Williams’s Library. Though she knew the full content of Robinson’s letters, the truncated versions that appeared in her Correspondence reduced him primarily to a compiler of literary anecdotes. Though Robinson understood the importance of recording incidents relating to Wordsworth and his literary friends, his letters to Mary Wordsworth far exceed brief encounters with literary history, as the following discussion of his letters residing in the Wordsworth Library will make clear.  

II

         Crabb Robinson knew of the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey by the late 1790s, and possessed a copy of the Lyrical Ballads during his extended visit to Germany between 1800 and 1805, having been introduced to Wordsworth’s poetry by Robinson’s former Bury friend and then resident of the Lakes, Catherine Buck Clarkson (1770-1856), and later to Wordsworth himself in London in March 1808 in the home of Charles and Mary Lamb. Robinson published a lengthy review of Wordsworth’s political tract, The Convention of Cintra, in 1809,[5] and in September 1810 served, at the request of Clarkson, as Dorothy’s escort from Bury to London. He noted in his Reminiscences for that year:

This improved my acquaintce with the Wordsworth family – Miss W: without her brothers genius & productive power, had all his tastes & feelings And he was in his youth & in middle age as warmly attached to her, as late in life he became attached to his daughter. No one rivaling them in his affections but his admirable wife.  (vol. 2, f. 13)[6]

Robinson met Wordsworth again in 1812, and served as the mediator in the famous dispute that year between Wordsworth and Coleridge, an act that endeared him thereafter to both men.[7]  

   Robinson did not meet Mary Wordsworth until May 1815 during one of her visits to London, noting in his diary,  “Mrs W. appears to be a mild & amiable woman, not so lively or animated as Miss W. but like her devoted to the Poet” (7 May 1815, HCR MS Diary, vol. 4, f. 107).[8] At that same time he also met Sara Hutchinson, describing her as “a plain woman – rather repulsive at first, but she improves on acquaint[an]ce greatly” (23 May 1815, HCR MS Diary, vol. 4, f. 113). After a second meeting with the Wordsworths at the Lambs, he remarks, “I began to feel quite an intimate cordial with Mrs Wordsworth[.] She is an amiable woman” (28 May 1815, HCR MS Diary, vol. 4, f. 116). On 1 June he invited them to a breakfast party at his rooms in London, joined by his older brother Robinson (1770-1860) of Bury, who, along with other members of his family, appears often in Crabb Robinson’s correspondence with Mary Wordsworth. In the summer of 1816 Robinson traveled throughout the Lake District, visiting the Wordsworths at Rydal Mount for what would be the first of over 20 visits ending in 1858, including ten extended stays at Christmas between 1835 and 1848 that provoked Edward Quillinan’s clever, but sincere, expression, “No Crabb, no Christmas.”

   In 1820 Robinson’s relationship with the Wordsworths elevated considerably when he joined them (along with Mary’s relations, Thomas Monkhouse and his new bride) for a two-month tour through Switzerland, Italy, and France, commencing a lengthy period of travels and travel writings that he would share with them. Three travel diaries were kept of this journey – one by Robinson, and one each by Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth, the originals of the latter two belonging to the collections at the Wordsworth Library, the other at Dr Williams’s Library. Robinson, the inveterate deprecator, considered the diaries of Mary and Dorothy superior to his own. He took the original of Mary’s diary back to London, referring to it on multiple occasions. On 18 November 1823 he writes:

Finished Mrs Wordsworth’s Journal – I do not know when I have felt more humble than in reading it – It is so superior to my own[.] She saw so much more than I did tho’ we were side by side during a great part of the time – Her recollection and her observation were alike employed with so much more effect than mine – This book revived impressions nearly dormant and corrected some errors in my own narrative –  (HCR MS Diary, vol. 10, f. 63)

Earlier that year Coleridge joined William and Dorothy Wordsworth on a tour of Scotland, and the next April, during a visit to London, Dorothy brought the manuscript of her travel narrative with her. When she left on April 22, Robinson, just as he had done with Mary’s travel diary, retained Dorothy’s manuscript, sending her his comments a week later. That December, in a burst of confidence, Robinson sent Dorothy an account of his own recent travels in Normandy, though he still could not help describing it in his diary as “a bad letter” (15 December 1824, HCR Diary, vol. 11, f. 19).  A year later he sent Dorothy another letter narrating his most recent travels, a performance repeated in 1826 and 1827. He reread her Scottish diary in April 1827 and again in June 1833, during a visit to the Lakes just prior to his tour of the Isle of Man with William Wordsworth, no longer hesitant to criticize her performance, for by this time he had already composed nineteen travel diaries himself. He was particularly baffled that she did not fill her volume with more of the conversations that passed between Wordsworth and Coleridge instead of “minute description,” amazed that she had recorded only one sentence by Coleridge during the entire tour! (HCR Travel Diary, 28 June 1833, vol. 22, f. 16). Robinson’s letters to Dorothy reveal both a latent competitiveness as a travel writer with her narratives and an irrepressible kinship with another inquisitive wanderer like himself. After her illness severely limited her mental and social capabilities, he continued to send short accounts of his travels to Rydal Mount, addressing them to Mary but always with instructions that they were to be shared with Dorothy. After his summer travels in 1841, he noted in his diary, “I wrote a letter to Mrs Wordsworth givg her an accot of my journey And as dear Miss W: has a momentary pleasure in such things, I addressed it to her” (11 October 1841, HCR MS Diary, vol. 18, f. 225).

Robinson’s first surviving letter to Mary Wordsworth, composed during his visit to the Lakes in the summer of 1833, reveals a growing intimacy not previously revealed in his diary, describing a walk with her on 9 July as “delicious” (HCR Travel Diary, 9 July 1833, vol. 22, f. 22). His relationship with the Wordsworths deepened even further when he accompanied the poet on a six-month tour of France, Germany, and Italy in 1837. His first letter to Mary in the collection at the Wordsworth Library was composed on this tour, his appellations revealing the extraordinary degree of familiarity he had now acquired with the Wordsworths:

Ma chere Maman – As I pass among the intelligent for the Son of M: votre Mari Both of our characters require that you should not disclaim the revered title. Whether I owe mine to any strong personal resemblance as to my filial assiduities I cannot pretend to determine Perhaps the latter In fact, M le Pere not having the full possession of his eyesight or entire use of his fingers I have undertaken to relieve him of a portion of the labour of writing by narrating the history of our journey leaving him to put in the Sense and the Sentiment that generally occupy but a minute space in a traveller’s diary[.]  (WLL, Wordsworth, W and D/7/515.1)

This tone of familiarity will not diminish thereafter. In 1842, the poet John Kenyon saw Robinson writing a letter to Mary and boldly commanded Robinson to “give my love” to her, to which Robinson retorted in his next letter to Mary on 7 March, ‘‘Marry come up! I don’t approve of such familiarities in any body but myself” (Morley, Correspondence 1:455).   He had grounds for making such a claim, for on 14 February 1842, just three weeks prior to that letter, Wordsworth finished his dedicatory poem to Robinson for ‘Memorials of a Tour in Italy’, which appeared in the 1842 edition of Poems of Early and Late Years:

           To Henry Crabbe Robinson.

Companion! by whose buoyant Spirit cheered,

In whose experience trusting, day by day

Treasures I gained with zeal that neither feared

The toils nor felt the crosses of the way,

These records take, and happy should I be

Were but the Gift a meet Return to thee

For kindnesses that never ceased to flow,

And prompt self-sacrifice to which I owe

Far more than any heart but mine can know.

                           W. Wordsworth

Rydal Mount.

Feb. 14th, 1842.

This was an honor beyond anything the normally reticent, self-deprecating, behind-the-scenes son of a Presbyterian tanner from Bury St. Edmunds (who, of course, did not spell his middle name with an ‘e’) could ever have imagined. He vacillated between joy, pride, and humility in his letter to Mary Wordsworth on 22 April 1842:

I am well aware that I have received the highest honour I ever shall receive in this Life – Being in the King’s Commission of Assize & Nisi Prius is a fool to it! My pride is mixed up with humility I feel that I possess –- that is, my name possesses a sort of vicarious immortality It is well – if a man can do nothing to stamp his name, that the friendship of a great poet should fix it – That friendship is evidence of qualities– but why pursue the obvious thought? I have no fear of any loss of the identity from the obtrusion of an e at the end of Crabb – No wonder that Mr Wordsworth took for granted that my name was spent [sic] like that of the only man who ever gave distinction to it … I informed – Moxon of the misspelling And he ought to have corrected it –’ (Morley, Correspondence, 1:459) 

III

Though his relationships with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb are among Robinson’s greatest claims to fame, he considered his friendship with Mary Wordsworth among his most valued personal treasures. He must have been highly gratified when Edward Quillinan, Wordsworth’s son-in-law, once told Robinson that a letter from him is “one of the most acceptable things [Mrs Wordsworth’s] post-bag ever contains” (Morley, Correspondence 2:546). Robinson’s letters to Mary touched on a wide range of topics, such as his admiration of the popular but controversial Anglican minister, Frederick Robertson of Brighton, “one of the most admirable preachers I ever heard” he tells Mary on 22 July 1848 (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/11); celebrating his success in establishing the Flaxman Gallery and University Hall in 1848 at a ‘dancing Soiree’ at H. N. Talfourd’s in which “It would be indecorous to attend before 10 OClock – Such are our London ways”  (16 December 1848, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/13); his astonishment in December 1849 at leaving Brighton early one morning and arriving at St James’s Place in London in time for breakfast, declaring to Mary, “Such are the results of Rail road Travelling”[9] (3 December 1849, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/18); his anticipation of the effects of aging, remarking to Mary that “It is, it must be so with those of our generation … the alacrity of our habits abates – And we have every reason to rejoice when our progress downwards is as gentle and free from disturbance, as is the case with both of us –” (23 December 1851, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/23) or even more exquisitely expressed three years later, when he writes, “If you think me inattentive dear friend, do not suppose it is wilful – nor that I forget you – Indeed the infirmity of old age is not so much forgetfulness as a dreamy way of thinking of the objects of interest, not lively enough to lead to any exertion” (22 December 1854, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/30); his joy and satisfaction in bringing Catherine Clarkson and Mary Wordsworth together again in November 1853, telling his brother the next month that “no one act of my life has given so much pleasure as in taking Mrs Wordsworth to Playford – And this she says is the feeling of Mrs W: as well as herself” (Morley, Correspondence 2:798); his irritations over the committee’s handling of the Wordsworth monument in Westminster Abbey, declaring to Mary on 22 December 1854, “It is these rich bodies – Deans & Chaps and Prelates in their secular office – not Bishops in their spiritual function who are destroying the Church more than its external enemies are” (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/30); his thrill over receiving the Minute books of the original Abolition Society from the estate of Catherine Clarkson (4 April 1856, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/37); and in his last letter to Mary, on 9 December 1858, his discouragement over British conflicts in India and China and the continuance of slavery in America, confessing to her that he does “not know whom to trust and what to expect” (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/44).

         Politics and religions were not excluded, though Robinson and the Wordsworths were generally on opposite sides. He cannot repress his anxiety over the revolutions in Europe in 1848, convinced that “Even the revolutions of our youth are exceeded in variety & complexity by those of the present age how events crowd & jostle each other!” he writes on 16 December of that year (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/13). After Louis-Napoleon’s coup in France in 1851 he boldly declares, “It seems as if the liberties of mankind are doomed for generations” (23 December 1851, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/23). An ardent abolitionist since the 1790s, Robinson begins 1855 by ordering Mary Wordsworth a prescription to the anti-slavery periodical The Advocate, careful not to “force attention to a very painful subject” but hopeful that Eliza Fletcher might have a favorable reaction to it or that, given her weak eyes, some other friend might read it to her, for, he adds, it has “one great merit – It is very short” (9 January [18]55, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/31). Though Robinson’s walks with Wordsworth and Thomas Arnold often turned to religion, his letters to Mary occasionally a realm that required a degree of sensitivity on both parties. For Robinson, one of the most difficult doctrines held by orthodox Christians (like Mary Wordsworth) was the doctrine of eternal punishment. He writes on 22 March 1849, “Has it never occurred to you when musing on some of the most gloomy of the doctrines concerning the future destiny of the human race that it rather elevates unduly mankind in supposing it to be the object of Gods everlasting wrath – How I have been led to the expression of this thought now, it would be hard to say – It is very often in my mind” (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/15). When Robinson’s housekeeper suffers contusions from the crush of attendees to hear the brilliant 22-year-old Baptist phenomenon, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, at the Music Hall at Surrey Gardens, he surmises “The world is in a maze just now of religious disputation – The Church finds that formal creeds effect little in the way of securing a uniformity of faith – And every where the most powerful preachers are those who excite the most apprehension –” (20 April 1857. [WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/39).

These concerns were frequent topics of discussion among Robinson’s many friends within the Wordsworth circle surrounding Rydal Mount and Grasmere, such as the Dr Thomas Arnold and his wife, Mary, parents of Matthew Arnold, who resided at Fox How; Dr John Davy (1790-1868), younger brother of scientist/poet Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and his family at Lesketh How, as well as his mother-in-law, Eliza Fletcher (1770-1858) (a poet, formerly of Edinburgh) at Thorney How and, after 1841, at Lancrigg; Edward Quillinan (1791-1851) (he married Dora Wordsworth in 1841) at Spring Cottage; and other friends, such as Isabella Fenwick (1783-1856) at Ambleside (cousin of Robinson’s friend Henry Taylor, the dramatist), Strickland Cookson (1801-77) (eventually Wordsworth’s and Robinson’s executor who was originally from Kendal), Mr Carr (a retired surgeon), John Carter (Wordsworth’s assistant when Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland and, after his death, served as Mary’s assistant and amanuensis), Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), and Edward Moxon (1801-58), Wordsworth’s London publisher. The breadth of Robinson’s social circle is staggering at times, connecting Rydal Mount and the Lakes with friends and relations at Bury, Brighton, Playford Hall, Mortlake, and London; in one letter alone he names 36 individuals! (20 October 1856, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/38). Morley would have relished Robinson’s comment on one individual in particular, the poet/critic Matthew Arnold, who appears in three letters. Robinson writers to Mary on 4 April 1856: “Matthew Arnold is become a member of the Athenaeum [Robinson was a founding member] I caught a glimpse of him lately – He was looking very happy – indeed in bouyant spirits – The Doctor’s spirits children have most of them – indeed all of them, done well In this sense too they have done him credit They have followed his Career as an Educator with credit – They have become nearly a family of School inspectors” (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/37). Two years later he is more critical, though upon second thought striking through his comment, which to Mary’s weak eyes was probably illegible but not to ours: “And I catch a glimpse once in a Season of Matt: Arnold – But he is lofty – And requires more courting than I am supple enough to administer But he is very friendly when roused –” (5 March [18]58].  [WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/41).

Unfortunately, from Morley’s Correspondence (the only published portions of Robinson’s correspondence with Mary to date) we learn little of Robinson’s intellectual and social exchanges with his circle of friends in the Lakes, for all such matters were removed in favor of anecdotes and opinions solely related to William Wordsworth and his literary friends. In many cases, Morley’s deletions produce noticeable disjunctions between Mary’s letters and Robinson’s responses. For instance, in November 1835 a letter arrived from Rydal Mount requesting Robinson’s presence for Christmas (the first of many subsequent invitations), along with news of various members of the Wordsworth circle.  A reading of both letters in full reveals the gaps created by Morley’s excisions.

Mary Wordsworth to Crabb Robinson, undated

[received on 22 November 1835]

My dear Friend

   We heard by a letter from Moxon dated the 9th of your arrival in England – & you should not have remained so long without welcome salutation from Rydal Mount but that Wm was from home, & I forwarded the letter to him – & depended upon his writing a few lines of greeting to you from Whitehaven – however he is returned, not having done so – finding that writing was inconvenient to him, from a sprain he got some weeks ago in his right arm, & for which he has been using hot sea-baths, & is better – but yet it devolves upon me to send you a few hasty lines, which I readily do – hoping I may induce you to come at your convenience the sooner the better – & chear us by a detail of your adventures. It must be purely a work of charity – Your presence to W. would be inestimable – he wants such a friend to take him out of himself & to divert his thoughts from the melancholy state in which our poor Sister is struggling (to use her own word) – You will be surprised to hear that her bodily health is good – but her mind is, I may say in a state of childishness – From the wonderful change that has taken place in her constitution – our medical attendant has been induced to attempt to withdraw gradually all stimulants – & this has nearly been effected without bad consequences – & we look with somewhat of hope, to the time, when she is restored to the diet of a Person in health. Her memory for passing events, which at one period was quite gone, (tho’ retrospectively it was perfect, & her mind if it could be fixed on books or serious matters as vigorous as ever) is much recovered – & this encourages us to trust that her intellect also may be restored – but alas at present her thoughts and manners are quite childlike. She has much wild pleasure in her sallies – yet almost at the same time bemoans her sufferings which it is difficult for us to understand. But this slight sketch must satisfy you – at present. Dora thank God is better – but still an invalid.

   In a few days we shall have an opportunity to forward (which Moxon’s letter asked us to do) such portions of Ch: Lamb’s letters as W. chuses to part with – We should like your judgemt to be exercised regarding any thing that should be withheld from the public – You know we are very delicate upon the point of publishing the letters of private friends – but we feel that in the case of dear Ch. L– the objections are not so forcible  – The Essays he himself gave to the public are so much in the character of his letters.

   Should you find it convenient to come to us, we shall expect & insist upon, your being an inmate during the day at R. M. – but it would neither be comfortable to you nor to ourselves, for you to lodge under this roof – I have no scruple in telling you this – knowing your habits, & that you like the liberty of a lodging of your own – & such are to be had as will exactly suit you at the foot of our hill – where you alight from the Coach – observe that one runs 3 times a week from Kendal & arrives here at 10 o.c. on the Monday & Wed: & Fridy Mgs – Let us hear from you, & believe me with affec regards from all to be very sincerely but in haste

                                       Yours

                                                   M. Wordsworth

   Dora, upon asking what I have said about yr coming to see us, suggests that – as I have put it upon Charity – your good nature may induce you to set off at yr own inconvenience – but I do not mean you to do this on any account – & in fact yr company would be to us more valuable a month hence when we shall lose a little niece of mine who has been sojourning with us during the last melancholy twelvemonths –& who has been an interesting Companion to her Uncle on his Walks.

   We have not heard from Mr Courtenay since you went away.

(Morley, Correspondence, 1:280-2)

Robinson responded the day he received her letter. The italicized portion is all Morley included in her Correspondence.

Crabb Robinson to Mary Wordsworth, 22 November 1835.

My dear friend

   I was on the point of writing to you when your most acceptable tho’ alarming letter reached me – Apropos of the letter – let me give you a hint Whenever there is in your house any one whose health is a subject of apprehension abstain from using a black seal, even tho’ you are in mourning – Fortunately, just before your letter carried I had seen Mr Kenyon at the Athenaeum who had in answer to my anxious enquiries said – “Oh! – Dora’s sure to recover – She is not quite well. But W is in excellent spirits about her – And Miss W: is not worse[”] On this I meant to write – for I wanted only to know how you all were before I would sit down to speak about myself & my idle summer movements

   Now your kind letter drives all such matter out of my head – For I must answer your invitation – It is made in such away as to be quite irresistible  You may therefore consider it as accepted provided you modify the proposed arrangements in the way necessary to make my visit perfectly agreeable – It will not do, as you suggest, to get a room for me to sleep in as you suggest in your neighbourhood; I must have a lodging including two rooms and where I can have my breakfast regularly & comfortably and tea occasionally – As I know you will not consider me as a stranger, but as one of your family I shall not at all scruple dining generally with you, leaving you at an early hour – And then as I am accustomed to sit up later than you do, I shall have my own fire to go to late, or rise very early to it, as circumstances may suggest

   Of course there must be such lodgings in your neighbourhood There being so many spare apartments in the winter set apart for summer visitors – You need not be anxious about making a bargain for me –

   I do not at present see why I should not come to you whenever you particularly wish it – my brother expects me to go down to Bury soon – And there may be some Executorship business to discharge, but such matters do not generally bind as to time

   I have been but two days in town And have not yet seen either Moxon or Talfourd – But M: wrote me a good account of dear Mary Lamb – I mean to call on the Serjeant to night

   I have read with great pain the sad account of Miss W: These are most distressing & humiliating evidences of our infirm & perishable nature – But the temporary obscurations of a noble mind can never obliterate the recollection of it’s inherent & essential worth – There are two fine lines in Göthes Tasso which occur – perpetually to my mind, And are peculiarly applicable here. I can give them to you on in this shape –

           “These are not phantoms bred within the brain:

I know they are eternal, for they are.

Your letter does not exclude the hope that even here and for us the veil may be lifted up. I shall rejoice indeed if I can see her as she was, If I can not, it will be consolation of an irremediable calamity

   I [answer] this your letter without having it by me – not intending to write – But meeting with a frank unexpectedly I do not chuse to let it escape me unused – I shall expect to hear from you within a week or two – The sooner the better – You will then write more explicitly about C: Lamb’s letters

   In haste

               With affectionate regards to all

                                       Most truly yours

                                                   H. C. Robinson

Athenaeum  22 Nov. 1835./–

(Crabb Robinson Correspondence, DWL, vol. 1834-35, no. 141)

What Morley included is apropos to the affairs of the circle, since Robinson had a twenty-three-year friendship with Dorothy at this point, but it is Morley’s omissions that establish the basis for the kind of personal relationship Mary and her sister-in-law shared with Robinson.  He readily accepts Mary’s invitation, and boldly places added restrictions on his place of residence. Though she knows his “habits” and that he likes “the liberty of a lodging of [his] own],” he does not hesitate to enlighten her about his bachelor requirements of two rooms, a breakfast, tea, and a fire so he can read late at night!

In several of the letters in the collection at the Wordsworth Library, Robinson reveals domestic troubles to Mary Wordsworth that rarely, if ever, were included in letters to any correspondent other than his brother or Catherine Clarkson. Mary Wordsworth consistently enquired upon Crabb Robinson’s domestic situation in London, but she was also concerned about the travails of the Robinson household in Bury, which by the 1840s and early 1850s was consumed by both the deteriorating mental and physical condition of Thomas Robinson due to epilepsy and the slow but inevitable demise of Henry Robinson (1837-56), Crabb Robinson’s consumptive great-nephew, namesake, and would-be heir. For instance, in a letter to Mary dated 22 February 1849, Robinson frets over the hiring of a new superintendent and servants for his building at 30 Russell Square. Though hesitant to discuss “the lowest object that just occurs to me to mention, and that is myself,” he nevertheless declares: “I am threatened with a change in my domestic arrangements which puts into peril my future comfort Your Son William will be able to appreciate the importance of this incident better than you can be” (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/14). William Wordsworth, Jr., a newly wed, had experienced significant changes in his domestic life the previous year, changes he most likely welcomed but which the aging Robinson feared:

Now, I have lived here into my tenth year – And at the age of 73 it is no slight evil to see every person I am accustomed to, removed out of the house – I am told that the new people will be better than the last – That may be the fact without my thinking so At all events the new Servants will have to be taught my ways, as well as acquainted with most of my friends & Associates.  This aggravates the painful Sense of my being so entirely dependent on others for comfort – It is only now that that sense is beginning to be painful.  I have come to the conclusion that it is for my happiness that I should remove into a house, And be thoroughly domiciled with those who would take care of me – And in which house I might have the attendance of a man servant.

   My thoughts now turn on the necessity of a change of life – I know very well the sort of persons I want, but I know not where to find the persons.

   Did we know each other, there must be many who could promote my happiness as I might theirs But where are they? An advertisement in the Times will do no good – I have been kept from looking about me as I should have done, by the uncertainty of my brothers life – No one expected three years since that he would be alive now – And now, tho’ his fits occasionally recur, now I am more anxious about my niece than I am about him – Sometimes I think that he may survive her & her sister – What a prospect is that for me – What an opening to the consciousness that my position will call on me to discharge duties which I am unable to discharge – Then, you will say, they are no longer duties – But there will be the need of me – And it will be humiliating for me to plead inactivity – But why weary & worry you with all this? – It is well my paper is at an end.

                                                   (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/14)

Mary dashed off a letter to Robinson the same day she received his, initially interpreting the reference to her son William to imply that Robinson the inveterate bachelor was about to be married! She dismisses his complaint of “egotism” and immediately seeks a remedy for his problem, responding on 24 February: “What you speak of in your very interesting letter, as being the ‘lowest object’ upon which you treat, i.e, yourself, is the one which impels me to take up my lazy pen at once” (Morley, Correspondence 2: 687-91). Mary Wordsworth’s letter, published by Morley without any knowledge of Robinson’s letter, makes it extremely difficult for the reader to contextualize her comments. When read together, however, the sympathy between the two friends emerges.  Upon receiving Robinson’s letter Mary relayed his plight to her Grasmere friends, Dr and Mrs John Davy (1790-1868) (Sir Humphry Davy’s younger brother), who suggested a possible new housekeeper for Robinson’s building, a Mr Bowen, a former servant of the doctor when he was in Constantinople. The Davys were confident Robinson could rely upon him as well as the Wordsworths did their trusted servant James, who eventually became Robinson’s personal attendant during his Christmas visits.

         As one would expect, the letters that passed between these two friends are replete with references to William, Dorothy, and Dora Wordsworth. Robinson writes to Mary on 31 January 1847, seconding Sara Coleridge’s request to dedicate her new edition of her father’s Biographia Literaria to Wordsworth. Sara’s letter to Wordsworth, which appears at the beginning of her 1847 edition, is dated 30 January 1847, the day before Robinson’s letter. Embedded in Robinson’s letter to Mary, however, is an important confession:

The names of Wordsworth & Coleridge will be inseparable as long as they live in History And therefore Mrs Coleridges wish on the present occasion seems very natural – It makes one grave, the being thus forced to think of that period when we the many shall be utterly forgotten, And only a very few remain floating on the memories of men, but I rejoice in having known & in still knowing the few. (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/7)

Among “the few” was Dora Wordsworth, whom Robinson had known since her early teens and was well aware of the deep attachment Wordsworth felt toward his only surviving daughter. The Robinson collection at the Wordsworth Library contains his last extant letter to her, dated 20 May 1847, just six weeks prior to her death at the age of 43. Robinson’s final consolatory remarks could not have come easily. “In truth,” he writes,

you are (supposing the very worst which is uncertain,) but a step or two in advance on that road which we are alike travelling ... And when I think of all the consolations that attend you in your present affliction And draw a comparison between you to day and myself tomorrow I have not the assurance to offer so insolent a feeling as pity. (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/8)

After 1847, the presence of death at Rydal Mount seemed almost palpable, and Robinson’s letters allude to it often. He writes to Mary on 12 July 1849:

At the age at which we are now arrived, these occurrences are ever taking place – Death is never out of my mind – The expectation rather than the fear ever present – And what I daily see and hear tends to diminish its terms. (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/17)

After Wordsworth’s death in April 1850, Robinson was asked by the poet’s son, William, to provide whatever material he might have of interest to Christopher Wordsworth, Jr, who had been chosen to write the poet’s Memoir. Despite being Wordsworth’s chief traveling companion in Europe, gracious host in London, and frequent visitor to Rydal Mount, Robinson nevertheless felt inadequate to the task. In a letter that fills an important gap in Robinson’s correspondence concerning the death of his poet friend, he writes to the younger Wordsworth on 3 May 1850:

As far as I am concerned, it only strengthens a sense which has occasionally oppressed of me, of my own incapacity to profit by the opportunities afforded me by the intercourse I have had with your father; Combining as he did a larger portion of intellectual & moral greatness than any individual with whom I have been permitted to associate And certainly one of the greatest & best of men that either my eye has beheld or my mind has dwelt on as a subject of contemplation –

    My contributions will be few, very few & of very little value, And the consciousness of this humiliates me – (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/19)[10]

Thankfully, history has proved that statement wrong. His next letter to Mary, four days later, succinctly captures why his appreciation for Wordsworth is superior to those who only knew him through his writings. Here, in his second response to his “dear friend” after the poet’s death (his first response is no longer extant), he congratulates her “for the power which you have possessed to endure your heavy trial heroically,” and then adds this tribute to his favorite poet:

It is also some slight comfort to know, that with scarcely a single exception the public voice has been loudly expressed in due honour of the great & good man who has been removed – The world can know him only in the one character – The kindred & the friends know him in both. (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/20)

Robinson offered Mary a similar appraisal after Dorothy’s death in January 1855:

There will be but one universal feeling among those who knew Miss Wordsworth when she was the active and powerful spirit which was so lovingly acknowledged by the brother who last preceded her –

    I doubt whether we ought to confess sorrow on such an occasion as this –But we know on high authority that we must grieve because we are men when such a shade as this passes away – For it is good to be reminded of past excellence of every kind whether it defended or adorned or instructed us all –

(29 January 1855, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/32)

It is only fitting that in this collection is also his response to Mary’s death in January 1859. He writes on 1 February to William Wordsworth, Jr., declaring that “It is impossible to speak of your honourd and beloved mother and her death in the usual terms – At such a death it is not lawful for any one but a Son to mourn – Strange paradox!” “The higher the excellence,” he continues, “the more perfect the character; – the less the grief – And yet in a qualified Sense this is undoubtedly true – Never was death more completely shorn of its terrors than in the case of both your parents –” (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/45).

When you live into your ninety-second year, as Robinson did, it is inevitable that you will see many deaths. His letters to Mary Wordsworth, however, celebrate the experiences of life, especially those involving family and friends, far more than they commemorate death. One controversial figure that entered the Wordsworth circle in the early 1840s was Harriet Martineau (1802-76), the former Unitarian turned skeptic and outspoken political and social reformer who built a cottage at Ambleside called the Knoll. The cottage and its grounds became not only the scene of her remarkable recovery in 1844 from an illness that had left her largely an invalid but also the laboratory for her progressive agenda. Robinson recognized her literary talents and believed her efforts at reform were well intentioned, but agreed with the Wordsworths that her controversial opinions and methods were at times misguided, especially her campaign for the authenticity of mesmerism, to which she attributed her cure. Even prior to her recovery, Robinson recognized her brilliance, writing to Mary Wordsworth on 4 December 1843: “H M: with all her mistakes is one of the purest & most high minded persons I ever knew. In spight of her speculative errors a most Christian-hearted creature” (Morley, Correspondence I. 531). He writes about her again on 5 June 1848, one of several references to her in the Robinson letters at the Wordsworth Library: “Her active industry is quite enviable, tho’ you will often wish that the direction lay otherwise” (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/9).  On 13 July of that year, after attending a lecture by the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in London, he writes to Mary Wordsworth:

There is no doubt H: M: is a person of marvellous energy – Were the judgement but equal to the power of action And the honest wish to exercise that power for the good of others!!! She would be altogether admirable – But it does not lye in the course of observation that all excellencies are continued in any one individual. (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/10)

By 1855, however, Robinson’s opinion of Martineau had lessened and would continue to do so, especially after her break with her brother, James (1805-1900), a theologian Robinson greatly respected. “Poor Harriet Martineau,” he writes to Mary on 17 February of that year.

I am sorry that I have not returned towards her till the close of her career the friendly feelings I once encouraged – She has many excellent qualities And has been misled I fear by excess of vanity, excusable when one thinks how she has been tempted by excess of applause & visited by chancellors & Prime Ministers without the introduction of family fortune or beauty – the usual attractions! (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/33)

He returns to Martineau again on 4 April 1856, slightly more critical:

No one supposed that Miss Martineau would have survived so long a time I understand that she continues to labour And whenever she does depart we shall I fear have further instances of that disregard of the discrimination before adverted to Perhaps there is no one Virtue more exposed to spurious exhibitions than Truth in the form of ostentatious and pharisaic love of truth As Coleridge has said – These are the complements not the inventions of malice. (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/37)

His patience with Martineau finally expires just after the death of Mary Wordsworth in January 1859, for Robinson is convinced that Martineau has written the obituary for Mary that appeared in the Daily News.[11] Writing to his wealthy friend Angelina Georgina Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906) on 11 February 1859, Robinson unleashes his criticism on someone who, in her proximity to and interaction with the Wordsworths and their circle of friends, should have known their true characters, especially that of Mary Wordsworth, an angelic saint to Robinson. Had Martineau done so, she would never have written such a commentary on the inhabitants of Rydal Mount.  “It was, I have no doubt, but I only infer from the style,” he declares,

the production of Harriett Martineau – And such as no one who had any womanly delicacy about her, or any sense of the especial excellencies of those of whom she wrote could possibly have written – She exaggerates the infirmities of Miss Wordsworth – and (I believe unintentionally,[)] overstates the precautions when to exclude her from the gaze of strangers – The patience with which Mrs W: bore the loss of her revered husband was indeed exemplary, And I knew it to be the consequence of an intense piety during all the time that I saw her after his death, I never heard her whisper the faintest murmer of complaint She would have deemed it an arrangement of Gods providence.  The whole article contains not the slightest allusion to this feature in her character – And when her grief at the loss of such a husband is adverted to, he is characterised only as her “old husband”! And his grief at the loss of Dora is insinuated to have been a selfish indulgence a sort of humour so that he compelled her to suffer for him and her too – To those three exquisite stanzas beginning

            “She was a phantom of delight”

There should be a fourth recording blindness –

                       (British Library, Add. MS. 85291, fols 20-21)

IV

Thomas Sadler and Edith Morley, the first editors of Robinson’s letters and diary, made Robinson’s praise of Wordsworth and his poetry known to the world. As the previous example reveals, however, Robinson was just as vocal in praising Mary Wordsworth to his friends and correspondents. When visiting the celebrated Lady Byron in Brighton (Robinson had made her acquaintance in 1853 through their mutual support of the ministry of Frederick Robertson and they corresponded frequently thereafter), Robinson mentions the Wordsworths. He writes to Mary on 26 February 1854 about the visit, noting that Lady Byron confessed that it was  

a great misfortune that she had never seen Mr Wordsworth And she said emphatically, that Lord B. notwithstg his invincible recklessness, and in spite of what he had written, spoke of Mr W. with great respect, even reverence towards his person praising his dignified manners after their meeting at the same table – And I am sure that were she ever in the north, she would not fail to call at Rydal – or on you wherever you might be –

    I on no occasion introduced Lord Bs name But when she introduced it I spoke freely I was somewhat reserved in referring to such poems as “She was a Phantom of delight[”] And the other poems on the same person, lest she should feel too acutely and tho’ not whisper the words, yet betray by her looks the Sentiment

         “What a happy lot has been her’s compared with Mine!”

                                             (WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/29)

Another tribute appeared in a letter to the Rev. John Miller (1787-1858) of Bockleton. Miller and his elder brother, the Rev. Joseph Kirkman Miller (1785-1855) of Walkeringham, both evangelical Anglican ministers, had long been acquaintances of the Wordsworths and were cousins of Robinson’s friend Elton Hammond, who committed suicide in 1820.[12] Robinson writes on 3 September 1857:

It will give you pleasure, I have no doubt, to read that on a recent visit to Rydal I found dear Mrs Wordsworth all I could wish and more than I could hope – It would seem burlesque to refer in speaking of a blind old woman of 88 to such an image as – the phantom of delight Yet the weightier couplet

                 A perfect woman, nobly planned

                 To warn, to comfort and command

may still be brought to one’s mind –

In her extreme old age she has attained an age not contemplated in those three stanzas to which I have referred And exhibits a phase of existence worthy to be the sequel of those – I spent nearly a week with her – during my stay I had frequent walks with her on the well known terrace And read to her from her husbands poems – The reading in which she most delights –

During this stay I never heard a syllable of regret pass her lips – She is the beau ideal of resignation – I probably related to you an anecdote – It is said that at the very last hour moment of his life She was heard to whisper in his ear – You are going to Dora. We may b sure therefore that in her calm submission she never forgets that she is going toe William.  

                                                                                   (WLL/2000.24.2.8.)

Robinson’s most ‘official’ comment on Mary Wordsworth, however, belongs to his Reminiscences, which he believed, of all his life writings, were most suitable for publication. In 1853, when he composed his chapter for 1835, his memories of that first Christmas at Rydal Mount provoked this terse yet fitting tribute to his friend of forty years. Drawing once again from Wordsworth’s 1804 poem, ‘She was a Phantom of Delight’, he writes: ‘Mrs Wordsworth was what I have ever known her Ands he will ever be while life remains, I have no doubt, perfect of her kind[.] I never her when she was the “phantom of delight[”] But since I have known her she has been

A perfect woman nobly planned

To warn, to comfort & command[.]

                                                                   (HCR Reminiscences, 1836, vol. 4, f. 104)

Not until the complete texts of all of Crabb Robinson’s letters to Mary Wordsworth are made available will a final assessment of their relationship be possible. However, with the recent publication of the 37 letters belonging to the Wordsworth Library, a more complete picture can be formed of two friends who, though emerging from disparate backgrounds and espousing opposing views in religion and politics – one a Tory and Anglican, the other a Whig and Unitarian -- were nevertheless united around domestic, moral, spiritual, and aesthetic ideals that, in elevating the beauty and grandeur of the natural world, found their ultimate expression in a deeply felt human sympathy.

The above paper was presented by Dr. Timothy Whelan as part of the Bindman Lecture Series, Wordsworth Museum and Library, Grasmere, UK, 6 July 2013. Another version was published as “Crabb Robinson’s Correspondence with Mary Wordsworth,” in The Wordsworth Circle 45.1 (Winter 2014), pp. 11-21.

 Notes

[1] Robinson’s first letter from any member of the Wordsworth circle was from Dorothy Wordsworth on 23 December 1810. The two would exchange more than forty letters prior to 1835 (only one thereafter, dated 11 October 1841).  Nearly sixty letters between Robinson and William Wordsworth from the years 1812 to 1835 can be found in the Robinson archive at Dr Williams’s Library. During that same period, only four letters passed between Robinson and Mary Wordsworth.

[2] The Robinson collection at the Wordsworth Library consists of 73 documents relating to Robinson, including one printed notice concerning the Wordsworth monument in Westminster Abbey; two copies of the itinerary of Robinson’s tour with Wordsworth of Italy in 1837 (one attached to the 1850 letter to Christopher Wordsworth, Jr.; three notes by Robinson; Robinson’s copy of a portion of a letter by Wordsworth to Dorothy, 1812; one letter from Catherine Clarkson to HCR, 1853, attached to a letter from Robinson to Mary Wordsworth; an extract from Robinson’s will concerning the Wordsworth family; and 64 letters by Robinson to various members of the Wordsworth family and circle, including a set of letters by Robinson to the Rev. John Miller of Bockleton composed between 1850 and 1858. Edith Morley saw the Miller letters and placed brief extracts from them in an appendix to volume 2 of Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, pp. 832-36. At that time the Robinson-Miller letters were owned by Emma Hutchinson.

   The entire collection of Robinson’s letters at the Wordsworth Library, along with several relevant letters from other collections in the UK, were published in 2013 on the website of the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies (see http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/pubs/hcr.html; the letters also appear on the website of the Wordsworth Trust at http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/wtweb/home.asp?page=Letters+ search+home&submitButton=New+search).  The Centre for Dissenting Studies is a research collaboration founded in 2004 between Dr Williams’s Library and the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, currently under the direction of David Wykes and James Vigus. Forthcoming from the Centre will be the Crabb Robinson Project, which will establish complete and reliable texts of Robinson’s manuscript writings that will place him in the canon as one of the major autobiographers of the nineteenth century. The primary editors, Timothy Whelan and James Vigus, are working with a team of subject-specialist editors to produce a series of print publications with Oxford University Press. The Reminiscences are due to appear in four volumes in 2018, along with an introductory essay collection; a volume of Early Miscellaneous Diaries will be prepared; and the main Diary, including numerous travel diaries, will be edited from 2018 onwards.

[3] Morley’s edition was eventually superseded by The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, Mary Moorman, and Alan Hill (8 vols, Oxford, rev. ed., 1967-1993); see also Frederika Beatty, William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount: An Account of the Poet and his Friends in the Last Decade (London: J. M. Dent, 1939); Mary Burton, ed., The Letters of Mary Wordsworth 1800-1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), and Beth Darlington, ed., The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981).

[4] Beatty includes a section (pp. 103-09) devoted solely to Robinson’s friendship with the Wordsworths, relying almost solely on Sadler and Morley, as have most commentators on Mary Wordsworth.

[5] Robinson’s comments on Wordsworth were part of a larger review titled “On the Spanish Revolution,” which appeared anonymously in the London Review in November 1809, pp. 231-275.

[6] Robinson’s MS Reminiscences are in four bound volumes at Dr Williams’s Library, dated 1790-1809, 1810-1825, 1826-1833, and 1834-1843.

[7] One document in the Robinson papers at the Wordsworth Library pertains to this reconciliation; see WLL [Wordsworth Library Letters], Wordsworth, W and D/ 4/236 and 236.1.

[8] Quotations from Robinson’s Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence are by permission of the Director and the Trustees of Dr Williams’s Library, London.

[9] In a later letter he describes a train as “this smoke belching monster the steam engine” (3 August 1858, WLL, Robinson, Henry Crabb/42).

[10] See also Robinson to Christopher Wordsworth, 22 April 1851 (Lambeth Palace Library, MS. 2144, Wordsworth Papers, fols. 212-14), a letter included in the online publication of Robinson’s letters at the Wordsworth Library (see above, n. 2) and which is largely unknown for its comments on Wordsworth.

[11] See Martineau’s more favorable notice of Mary Wordsworth in Biographical Sketches, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1876), pp. 402-08. She writes, “[H]er honoured name will live for generations in the traditions of the valleys round. If she was studied as the Poet’s wife, she came out so well from that investigation that she was contemplated for herself; and the image so received is her true monument. It will be better preserved in her old-fashioned neighbourhood than many monuments which make a greater show” (408).

[12] Another brother, Thomas Elton Miller (1783-1857), was also an Anglican vicar. Correspondence involving the Millers and Robinson between 1821 and 1867 can also be found in the Crabb Robinson Correspondence, Dr Williams’s Library, London.