1807–15: The Afflictions of Life

Abstract

In 1815, looking back across the years that had elapsed since his return to Grasmere from Coleorton in 1807, Wordsworth had good reason to characterise middle age as a time dominated by ‘domestic cares’ and ‘engrossed by business’. Poetry — if it featured at all in the lives of this world-weary generation — did so either as a source of ‘fashionable pleasure’, or ‘as a consolation for the afflictions of life’ (Prose III, 62). The period which began with anxious forebodings about the future of his literary career as he awaited the critical reception of the Poems in Two Volumes, rapidly plunged Wordsworth into one of the darkest phases of his life. Not only did his literary reputation plummet with the critical drubbing the 1807 Poems eventually received, his consequent financial anxieties were supplemented by tragedy in the family when after periods of protracted illness for all of them, two of the children — Catherine and Thomas — died. All this was suffered in a series of disastrous homes in a Grasmere that appeared to have been physically mutilated during their absence at Coleorton.