Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility

Wordsworth and Helen
Maria Williams; or,
the Perils of Sensibility
Three Grasmere Essays
Richard Gravil
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Wordsworth and Helen
Maria Williams; or,
the Perils of Sensibility
Three Grasmere Essays
Richard Gravil
HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks, 2010

© Richard Gravil, 2010
The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by Humanities-Ebooks, LLP,
Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
The Ebook (with the facility of word and phrase search) is available exclusively
from http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk
The paperback is available from Lulu.com
ISBN 978-1-84760-094-3 Ebook
ISBN 978-1-84760-095-0 Paperback

Contents
Preface 8
Introduction: Williams and Wordsworth, an Odyssey 11
1. Wordsworth’s Revolutionary Anima 16
‘A Region of Romance’ 16
‘Domestic carnage’ 30
‘Come now, ye golden times’ 33
2. An Affair of Sensibility 41
Twilight Tears 41
Affective elements in The Prelude 56
A language for the sense of aftermath 59
Wordsworth and the Sensibility Sonnet 65
3. Wordsworth (Fox) and Jeffrey: ‘Namby-Pamby’, or
the Shock of the New? 73
Poems, in Two Volumes and Charles James Fox 73
Francis Jeffrey on Wordsworth 81
Wordsworth Unmanned; or, the cost of criticism 100
Helen Maria Williams: a Select Bibliography 109
Appendix: Textual Echoes 111

Preface
The chapters in this volume are developed from lectures given at
the Wordsworth Summer Conference and Winter School in 2007
and 2008. The talks were not initially conceived as a series, and the
three chapters might have appeared in any order. It would have made
sense to begin with Helen Maria Williams’s earliest influence on
William Wordsworth, then look in detail at the relationship between
their accounts of the French Revolution, and close by glancing at the
damage done to his critical reputation by his liaison dangereux with
feminine sensibility as demonstrated in Poems in Two Volumes. Or I
could have opened with the celebrated matter of Jeffrey’s handling
of both Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and then considered
what it was in Wordsworth’s poetic allegiances that tempted
him to betray so much ‘feminine’ sensibility in his ‘Pansies’ as one
might call them, and why the impact of so much sensibility had the
effect of thrusting the admitted ‘manliness’ of the political sonnets
into the background.
It seemed, on balance, best to open with the grand historical topos
of ‘human nature seeming born again’, as encountered first by a
female historian and then a male poet; to go on by examining other
traces of the former’s work and sensibility to be found in the latter;
and to conclude (with what was, in fact the first lecture) by wondering
whether it was these traces of ‘feminine’ sensibility, or ‘effeminacy’,
by the standards of the day, that drew down upon one hapless
lake poet the scorn of Edinburgh. Complete reconstruction of
the approach in the first two chapters proved to be beyond my skill,
so the chapters do treat some elements of the story of Wordsworth
and Williams, especially as regards their experience of France, twice
over, though with different emphases.
The package is, to my mind, held together by this matter of (as I
would have it) ungendered poetic sensibility. Apart from anything

Wordsworth and Sensibility 9
of value that I might be found to be saying about Wordsworth and
Williams, or indeed Wordsworth and Jeffrey, the one thing I would
most like to register is the wrongness of Coleridge’s famous assertion
that Wordsworth’s personality was entirely masculine—that there
was nothing feminine in his nature.
Parts of chapter 1 are making their fourth appearance. A version
of it was published in The Wordsworth Circle, 40:1 (Winter 2009),
and in it I drew on an article first published in 1989, in the French
Revolution volume of the Yearbook of English Studies, edited by
J. R. Watson, which Stephen Gill has also seen fit to resurrect in his
Oxford ‘Casebooks in Criticism’ collection on The Prelude (2006).
But I have avoided the temptation to draw too much upon a relevant
chapter on ‘“The Milder day”: or, Manliness and Minstrelsy’ in
Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation (2003).

Helen Maria Williams, by Ozias Humphrey, 1792

Introduction: Williams and Wordsworth, an
Odyssey
While still a schoolboy, William Wordsworth, as most Wordsworthians
know, was already somewhat enamoured of Helen Maria Williams.
He expressed his admiration for the poet and her sensibility in his first
published poem—Sonnet on seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep
at a tale of distress—on which poem and its significance, I will dilate
briefly in Chapter 2. Their stories are considerably more intertwined
than that, however. This little book will argue that Williams’s work
had a greater influence on Wordsworth’s poetical development than
she is generally given credit for, and that Wordsworth’s loyalty to the
kind of writing her Poems in Two Volumes (1786) helped to inspire in
him is one of the primary reasons for the acrimonious reception of his
own Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). It will also claim that her work
is a major, if not the major, influence on the great poem of the nineteenth
century, The Prelude. In short, while this book has no discoveries
to announce about their connections, it does seek to re-assess
the significance of Williams to Wordsworth, both as a poet of the Age
of Sensibility, and as a writer of a compendiouis eye-witness history
of the great event of the age, an event formative in both of their lives.
On 13 July 1790, as all Wordsworthians know, Wordsworth
and Robert Jones arrived in Calais ‘on the eve of that great federal
day’, the festival that was to mark the first anniversary of the
French Revolution. Helen Maria Williams, on that day, was already
in Paris. Indeed she had a grand-stand seat in the Champ de Mars,
to witness what she called ‘the most sublime spectacle which, perhaps,
was ever represented on the theatre of this earth’. Her description
of Louis XIV and 600,000 spectators saying the national oath
together begins the first of some fifteen volumes of contemporary
history, volumes that would be cannibalized repeatedly, in the three