Wordsworth Museum(5). 글라스미어(Grasmere)

Wordsworth Museum(5). 글라스미어(Grasmere). 영국(England)

wordsworth.org.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family Tree

 

William Wordsworth

 

The Wordsworth Aumbry

This chest, long believed to have been an eighteenth-century confection, is now believed to have been in the Wordsworth family since its creation in the early sixteenth-century. The inscription may be translated as:

 

This work was made in the year of Our Lord 1525 at the expense of Wm.

Wordesworth son of William son of John son of William son of Nicholas husband of Elizabeth daughter and heiress of Wm. Proctor of Penyston on whose souls may God have mercy.

 

An aumbry is a 15th or 16th Century cupboard for storing food, clothesm, or, as in this case, sacred vessels in a Church.

 

The early 16th Century date can be confirmed by the following features: the Gothic tracery, which decorates the doors, was phased out by 1540; the doors are unframed, a pre-17th Century practise; and pre-Reformation iconography ('ihs' for Jesus and 'M' for Mary) can be seen in the central panels of the upper hinged door.

 

The particulars of its workmanship indicate that it was crafted abroad, possibly in Flanders. The closet match to the very peculiar typography of the aumbrey's inscriptions can be found on some Northern European tombstones of the first half of the 16th century, and also on the stained glass windows of King's College, Cambridge, which were made by Flemish craftsmen between 1515 and 1531.

 

The provenance of the aumbry can at least be traced back to 1770, when it was owned by Jonathan Wordsworth of Schole Hill, Penistone. It was then taken to Bretton Hall, near Wakefield. The poet William Wordsworth purchased it from Colonel Beaumont of Bretton Hall in 1840, and placed it in the dining room of Rydal Mount.

 

The aumbry is presently owned by the Wordsworth family, who have kindly loaned it to the Wordsworth Trust.

 

Felicia Hemans (1793-1835)

Angus Fletcher (1799-1862)

1829

Plaster Bust

 

Felicia Hemans sold more poems than any writer of her time except Byron. In 1818 she and her husband separated, leaving her with five sons to support by her writing. In 1830, she visited the Wordsworths' home at Rydal Mount.

 

On long-term loan from the National Portrait Gallery

 

Thomas Hudson (1701-1779)

Sir James Lowther, First Earl of Lonsdale (1736-1802)

Oil on Canvas

 

'Wicked Jimmy', the 'Bad Earl', the 'Tyrant of the North', 'Jimmy Grap-all', 'Earl of Toadstool' - just some of the nicknames given to Sir James Lowther, portrayed here in 'Vandyke' masquerade costume. 'He was truly a madman', concluded the Reverend Alexander Carlyle, 'but too rich to be confined'.

 

His wealth was matched by his meanness, well illustrated by his treatment of the Wordsworth family. John Wordsworth, the poet's father, was his landsteward and law agent in Cockermouth, and when he died in 1783 Sir James owed him ￡5,000 in legal and political fees. Despite six years of litigation, Sir James refused to pay the money to the Wordsworth children, leaving them in near poverty. It was not until after his death in 1802 that the family received their dues (with full interest) from Sir James's successor.

 

The Wordsworth Trust

 

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"Great men have been among us"

 

William Godwin (1756-1836), Philosopher and novelist

Portrait by JW Chandler

1798

Oil on Canvas

On long-term loan from Tate

 

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1798-1824), poet

Portrait by Richard Westall

1813

Oil on Canvas

On long-term loan from the National Portrait Gallery

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), poet

Portrait by Joseph Severn

1845

Oil on Canvas

On long-term loan from Lord Abinger

 

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 Wordsworth, War & Waterloo

War dominated the years of William Wordworth's greatest creativity and inspired some of his most powerful writing.

 

Armed conflict between Great Britain and revolutionary France began in 1793, the year in which Wordsworth published his first volume of poetry. The struggle continued for twenty two years, until the British and allied army commanded by the Duke of Wellington beat the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. This was a global conflict of unprecedented scale and intensity that touched the lives of everyone on Great Britain, including those resident in Grasmere, seemingly far removed from the scene of battle.

 

But what should a poet do during wartime ? Should he write ? Or should he fight ? Should he cerebrate his nation's military and naval triumphs ? Or should he mourn the dead, condemn war's horrors and portray those who suffer ?

 

Two hundred years after the Battle of Waterloo, we invite you to explore how Wordsworth responded to the war with France, and to discover how the national struggle shaped his peronal life and poetic development. By placing Wordsworth's own writing into the context of the conflict - alongside weapons, uniforms and objects from the war itself - we encourage you to reassess one of Britain's greatest writers as one of its most important war poets.

 

Unless otherwise stated, all lines quoted are by William Wordsworth.

 

Waterloo British Artillery

 

A 12 pounder Carronade

On Loan from Diana Matthews

The carronade was conceived by Robert Melville, a British Army officer, in 1759 and developed by the Carron Ironworks in Scotland.

 

It was employed by merchant ships as a defensive weapon and could be used to fire either round shot against vessels or grapeshot against boarders. It was only a quarter to a third of the weight of a conventional naval gun of the same calibre so required a smaller gun crew and could be reloaded faster. The disadvantage was that it had a much shorter range, 400 yards rather than a mile, but as the usual objective in attacking a merchant ship was to capture it with minimal damage, a weapon which was far more destructive at short range than a conventional gun of the same weight made it most attractive to traders and it was widely adopted by them.

 

During the American wars it proved very effective and the Royal Navy began to experimental with it as an offensive weapon with notable success. During the 1790's it became a standard element in the armament of naval vessels of all sizes, a development linked to a shift to more aggressive tactics by the Royal Navy, in particular that of "breaking the line."

 

It is significant that by the time of Trafalgar (1805) the first shot fired by HMS Victory, Nelson's flag ship, was from a carronade. But this was a 68 pounder (42 pounders were the largest calibre of conventional gun) which fired a double charge of a 68 pound cannon ball and a keg containing 500 musket balls, through the stern windows of the French flagship, devastating one of its gun decks.

 

The French were well aware of the critical advantage these gun gave the British. Napoleon, an artillery officer by training, wrote anguished memoranda about the inability of the French to make such guns, but although French science was very advanced, its technology was not and it took two decades for them to master the construction of comparable guns.

 

Wordsworth would have been well aware of the significance of carronades as his brother John was Captain of an East Indiaman and the Honourable East India Company had adopted them before the Royal Navy.

 

 

Hello, I'm Billy Bull. My father's John Bull. As you will see, he fights for Britain against the French tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte. You'll meet us all in this exhibition, and you'll see our pictures in many of the coloured cartoons. Follow me and I'll show you the best bits of the show - it's about a poet called Wordsworth and what he did and wrote in the war. He's got the same first name as me - William. But you can call me Billy.

 

'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive'

In 1789, Europe was shaken by the outbreak of the French Revolution, an event symbolized by the storming of the Bastille on 14th July. Many in Britain, including William Wordsworth, initially welcomed France's transformation from absolute monarchy to Republic.

 

The young poet, recently graduated from Cambridge, witnessed the revolutionary festivities during a trip to France in 1791-2, famously describing how 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very haeven' (The Prelude). During this visit, Wordsworth had a love affair with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who became pregnant.

 

Returning to Britain for financial reasons, Wordsworth set about writing A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff. In this highly controversial but unpublished pamphlet, the self-proclaimed 'advocateofrepublicanism' defended the guillotining of the French King Louis XVI, an event that contributed to the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France in February 1793.

 

With the commencement of hostilities, Wordsworth was unable to return to Annette or to see his baby daughter Baroline. He felt alienated from his country's cause. For him, Britain had joined the monarchical dynasties of Prussia and Austria in seeking to crush the revolutionary principles of liberté, égalité and fraternité.

 

 

'Monarchy and democracy being incompatible'

 

(Wordsworth, Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, 1793)

The 22-year-old Wordsworth wrote this republican pamphlet in 1793, around the time of the outbreak of war between Britain and France. It was never published. Had it been, there was a strong possibility Wordsworth would have been put on trial for treason, as fellow pamphleteers were.

 

We do not know whose handwriting this is.

 

 

Notice that there is a sketch outline of a face opposite.

Could this be the earliest surviving portrait of Wordsworth ?

 

 

William Wordsworth, Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, 1793

 

 

 

Look at this Frenchman with a bare bottom! This is a British joke because in France he's called a sans-culottes, a nickname given to the workers there. This artist is joking that sans-culottes literally means he wears no trousers! What it really means is he doesn't wear those long shorts called 'culottes' like posh Frenchmen do. Instead, a French worker would wear 'pantalons' - what we call trousers.

 

Anyway, he's watching the French King's head being cut off with a guillotine, so that everyone in France can be equal and have liberty. That would never happen in Great Britain, would it ?

 

The Zenith of French Glory ; The Pinnacle of Liberty.

 

The Martyrdom of Louis XVI, King of France               The Martyr of Equality

 

Liberty is 'too often obliged to borrow the very arms of despotism... and in order to reign in peace must establish herself by violence'

 

(Wordsworth, Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, 1793)

 

Wordsworth defended the execution of Louis XVI, King of France. Louis XVI was executed by guillotine on the 21st of January 1793. Less than a month later, these print were sold in London, presenting the shocking event to the British public. Isaac Cruikshank, James Gillray and others were to influence British public opinion through popular satirical cartoons such as these.

 

Gillary's cartoon contains many of the elements that were repeated in anti-French propaganda throughout the 1790s, including the figure of the sans-culottes, the guillotine, the mob (represented through their bonnets rouges), and the hanged figures of a judge, a priest and two monks.

 

From right to left : James Gillray, The Zenith of French Glory ; - the Pinnacle of Liberty, 1793 (Donald Coverdale collection); Isaac Cruikshank, The Martyr of Equality, 1793; Isaac Curikshank, The Martyrdom of Louis XVI, King of France, 1793

 

'calamities...consequent upon war'

War between England and France began in 1793, and in the opening years of the conflict, Wordsworth was an anti-war poet. In several of his most important poems of the 1790s, he portrayed a range of of war's victims, illustrating what he called the 'calamities...consquent upon war' ('Advertisement ' to 'Guilt and Sorrow').

 

A particular focus was on the moving stories of non-combatants - a father journeying to see his mortally wounded son ('Old Man Travelling'), a wife slowly going mad after her husband has enlisted ('The Ruined Cottage'), a family forced to follow the father figure to the scene of conflict: 'dog-like wading at the heels of war' ('Salisbury Plain').

 

Such poetry was politically controversial. With Wordsworth's friend and fellow poet Robert Southey particularly in mind, the satiric, loyalist newspaper The Anti-Jacobin denounced the writers of such hamnitarian verse as 'Jacobin' poets. This jibe implied that the writers were in league with the Jacobin faction that had taken control in revolutionary France. In the work of such 'Jacobin' poets, it complained, 'we are presented with nothing but contusions and amputations, plundered peasants and deserted looms'.

 

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John Bull's Progress.

                          John Bull Happy.                        John Bull going to the Wars.

                    John Bull's Property in danger.            John Bull's glorious Return.

                                                                    '... I beheld

With ill-suporess'd astonishment his tall And ghastly figure'

 

(William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805)

 

In this print, we follow John Bull's progress from hearth to combat and back again. We see devastation wreaked upon both the soldier and his family.

 

Look particularly at the way Gillray portrays the family's response. Like Wordsworth, he focuses on war's impact on those left behind. Can se imagine how the soldier felt at his family's horror at his appearance on his return?

 

James Gillray, John Bull's Progress, 1793

(Donald Coverdale collection)

 

 

It's 1793, and we're at war with France. Don't want those Frenchmen going round Europe cutting off all the king's and queen's heads, like they did in France!

 

Can you see my father, John Bull, in the picture on the wall? These cartoons show lots of English men like my dad. He loves drinking beer and eating roast beef. He's a bit fat and his face is a bit red. But he loves his country and his family and we all love him.

 

He's says he's going to join the army to fight the French. But I'm a bit worried for him. I've heard lots of stories about soldiers getting killed and wounded. I hope that doesn't happen to him. And who's going to look after mother and me, and my big sister and little brother, while he's away?

 

 

William Wordsworth, Alfoxeden notebook, 1797-8

 

Showing drafts of 'The Discharged Soldier' and 'Old Cumberland Beggar'.

 

 

'A Woman in the road I met'

 

(Wordsworth, 'The Sailor's Mother', 1802)

 

In his poem, 'The Sailor's Mother', Wordsworth both responded to Southey's poem of the same title and rewrote his own earlier poem 'Old Man Travelling', Written in 1802, just three years after Southey's poem, this poem shows Wordsworth's shifting loyalties through the transfromation of the central figure.

 

The poem again tells the story of an encounter with a woman travelling from a sea port which she has visited to collect her dead son's belongings. In this story, the lead character is 'Majestic in her persion, tall and straight' and Wordsworth feels pride that his 'Country's bred / Such strength, a dignity so fair'.

 

Notice how this contrasts with the 'bending figure' of 'Old Man Travelling'.

 

William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes, 1807

 

 

Family Activity : Colourful Caricatures

 

It was really expensive to buy coloured prints like these when they wer first produced. one picture could cost as much as an ordinary man might earn for a whole day's work.

 

One reason for this is that caricatures would have been coloured by hand as the technology to print pictures in colour did not exist 200 years ago. If the picture is by James Gillray then the colouring was probably done by a woman; however, lots of other artists and print sellers used children to colour their pictures instead - because it was cheaper.

 

 

'Victory or Death'

The Changing nature of the war with France contribute to a transformation in Wordsworth's political allegiances and his poetic treatment of the conflict. In the closing years of the 1790s, Frenchmen had 'become oppressors in their turn', exchanging 'a war of self-defence / For one of conquest' (The Prelude). Between 1797-8 and between 1803-5, French forces attempted to invade Great Britain, 'Impatient to put out the only light / Of Liberty that yet remains on Earth!' ('October, 1803')

 

During the second of these invasion threats, Britain responded by raising a volunteer army of 350,000 men ready to repel the French. Wordsworth enthusiatically joined this force, while also writing increasingly patriotic poetry.

 

The brief 'Peace of Amiens' (1802-3) enabled Wordsworth to return to France for the first time in a decade and to meet his former lover Annette Vallon and his daughter Caroline. Though little is known of this meeting, it appears that the poet made arrangements for their support while also informing them of his forthcoming marriage to his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson.

 

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'Carnage and screams beneath this blessed sun!'

(S.T. Coleridge, 'Fears in Solitude', 1798)

 

Cillray's cartoon offers a graphic depiction of the feared French invasion of Britain. Notice how he uses the symbols of French Jacobinism, such as the bonnet rouge and the guillotine. At the centre is the Prime Minister, William Pitt, who is being flogged by Charles James Fox, leader of the opposition.

 

James Gillray, Promis'd horrors of the French invasion, 1796 (Donald Coverdale collection)

 

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'And saw, ...

The Coast of France, the Coast of France how near !

Drawn almost into firghtful neighbourhood.'

(William Wordsworth, 'September, 1802')

 

This cartoon depicts an imaginary wind-powered landing craft, coveying the French army across the English Channel. Their invasion is helped by opposition politicians including Charles James Fox. Prime Minster William Pitt is shown in the top right hand corner blowing up a storm to repel the invaders.

 

Notice there are people's names in the blast of air from Pitt's mouth, including those of the Admirals Duncan and Howe.

 

James Gillray, The Storm rising; - or - the Republican Flotilla in danger, 1798 (Donald Coverdale collection) 

 

This poet Wordsworth's been sending his poems to the newspapers. Looks like he thinks everyone should read them ! They're not what I expected. I thought his poems were all about daffodils and clouds but these ones are about Bonaparte and the war! He doesn't like Boney much either. Says he'll never make a good leader. Father says Wordsworth is right about that.

 

Other people enjoy Wordsworth's war poetry too. Look in one of these two cases and you'll see one of his poems called 'Anticipation'. It's in one of father's books called 'The Anti-Gallican' that is full of jolly songs and rhymes about how great it is to be British and how we're going to thrash Boney. Wordsworth's poem is all about what will happen to the French if they invade. We'll kill them all and make a huge noise to celebrate. Wordsworth wants us to be so loud that it will hurt our Grandmas' cars!

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