The Lost Leader?
1In 1845 Robert Browning published “The Lost Leader”, a bitter poem about a great man who had deserted the cause of liberty “just for a handful of silver”. Few readers doubted whom he meant. William Wordsworth, then seventy-five and newly appointed Poet Laureate, had once been the most politically daring poet in England. To many younger writers he had become something worse than an opponent: a convert.
2The early Wordsworth earned his radical reputation. At twenty-one he went to revolutionary France and stayed for more than a year, and he later wrote of that time, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”. In 1793 he drafted a defence of republican government, which, prudently, he never published. Lyrical Ballads, which he and Coleridge issued in 1798, was radical in a subtler way. Its poems took as their subjects vagrants, convicts and the rural poor, and its preface argued that poetry should be written in something close to the language ordinary people actually speak. For readers used to the polished diction of the eighteenth century, the choice of both subject and style was itself a political statement.
3The later Wordsworth is just as well documented. In 1813 he accepted a government post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, collecting a tax on legal and commercial documents. He campaigned for the Tory interest in the county's elections, opposed Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the Reform Act of 1832, and in 1842 accepted a pension from the state. He also spent decades revising his autobiographical poem, The Prelude. The version published after his death in 1850 is, in places, noticeably more cautious than the one he had completed in 1805.
4Browning's explanation, that Wordsworth was bought, has the appeal of simplicity, but the dates tell against it. Wordsworth's faith in France had begun to crumble with the Terror of 1793–94 and was all but gone by the time Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, years before the state paid him anything. The more plausible story is less dramatic. Wordsworth married in 1802; by 1810 he had five children, two of whom died within months of each other in 1812. The stamp office, which came the following year, offered a steady income to a man who until then had depended largely on a legacy and on family money. Security did not cause his change of views, but it may well have made him less willing to revisit them.
5There is also a case that he changed less than it seems. What Wordsworth valued throughout his life was the small, settled community of the northern dales: the independent farmer, the parish, the ties of place. In the 1790s he saw that world threatened by aristocratic privilege; later he saw it threatened by industry, by the growth of cities and by a mass politics he distrusted. He did not so much abandon his loyalties as change his mind about where the danger to them lay. That is not a full acquittal. A poet who once gave a voice to vagrants and convicts ended his life defending institutions that had done little for either, and Browning was entitled to his anger. But the “lost leader” was not so much lost as left behind by the causes he had once led.