by Daniel Brocklehurst
Have you ever had the feeling that there is something slightly infantile about many of William Wordsworth’s poems? Sometimes descriptions of kittens and falling leaves, daffodils and daisies, Peter Bell and his flying boat, and Harry Gill and his chattering teeth… they strike one as having a somewhat childish quality. Many of Wordsworth’s contemporaries certainly thought so. Upon the publication of his 1807 Poems, Lord Byron labelled many of Wordsworth’s poems as ‘namby-pamby’ and ‘puerile’, and he couldn’t resist comparing Wordsworth’s ‘Written in March’ to the nursery rhyme, ‘Hey de diddle, the cat and the fiddle’. [1] Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review dismissed many of Wordsworth’s poems as ‘disgusting absurdities’, mostly about ‘babyish incidents’ furnished from ‘plebeian nurseries’. [2] Others came to Wordsworth’s defence: ‘If the poems really were the childish things they are accused of being,’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in Biographia Literaria (1817), ‘then they would have sunk into oblivion.’ [3] Wordsworth’s poems, of course, did not sink into oblivion; indeed, Wordsworth’s fame as a poet grew steadily throughout his lifetime. But it is also true that his poems were increasingly thought of as suitable for – and marketable to – children.
In August 2023, I visited the Jerwood centre on a research trip funded by the University of Sydney as part of my PhD to further explore the childish forms and features that exist in much of the poetry written by William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Jeff Cowton, Rebecca Turner, and Melissa Mitchell went out of their way to ensure that the books I had requested were ready for me to consult as soon as I arrived. While my research primarily examines the children’s texts that William and Dorothy might have echoed in their poetry, I was also interested in how their poems were gradually being recognised as suitable for children even in their own lifetimes. The library holds an impressive collection of books containing William and Dorothy’s poetry that were specifically published for children. What I would find in the dozens of books that were waiting for me, I wasn’t quite sure – but this, of course, is the whole point of a research trip. Some of the books in the Jerwood Centre couldn’t be consulted online at all, some once belonged to William or his relatives, and some were different copies of the same text that I suspected would provide clues as to how William and Dorothy’s poems were being read by children in the nineteenth century.
Selections from the Poems of William Wordsworth, Esq. Chiefly for the Use of Schools and Young Persons (1831) is the first publication in which William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s poems were specifically marketed as an educational book for children.[4] William entrusted schoolmaster Joseph Hine with the task of putting together the collection. In his Dedication, Hine explains how the included poems serve to ‘inspire’ young readers ‘with feelings and taste noble, enviable and virtuous’ (p. iii). No mention of childishness here. Instead, it is intimated that the poetry would serve to elevate children to a higher level of maturity. 365 pages long, the collection unsurprisingly includes poems that would consistently feature in future publications of William and Dorothy’s poetry for children, such as ‘We Are Seven’, ‘The Cottager to Her Infant’, and ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’. But they also contained more challenging poems, such as ‘The Female Vagrant’, ‘Tintern Abbey’, and extracts from ‘The Excursion’. It evidently did well; a second edition was printed in 1834. [5] And William clearly approved: the Jerwood Centre holds a copy that William gifted ‘To the children at Brinsop from their affectionate uncle, Wm Wordsworth’. Brinsop Court, in Herefordshire, was the home of Thomas Hutchinson (brother to William’s wife Mary) and his family. William and Dorothy visited Brinsop Court several times, (see Frances Thomas’s article about this).
Of Thomas and Mary Hutchinson’s five children, it is William’s niece Sarah Hutchinson (1821–69) who appears to have assumed ownership of William’s gift.[6] Not only did she write her name underneath her uncle’s, but marks on the contents page draw attention to perhaps her favourite poems: ‘Lucy Gray’, ‘The Pet Lamb’, ‘The Longest Day’, to name a few. Sarah also added to the volume, copying out three of Wordsworth’s poems in pencil at the front and back of the book: ‘Calm is the fragrant air’, ‘Not in the lucid intervals of life’, and ‘The Sun, that seemed so mildly to retire’, all of which were first published four years after Hine’s collection in Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835) – when Sarah would have been around fourteen years old. The three poems, all included in the section entitled ‘Evening Voluntaries’, describe the powerful sights and sounds of nature. Sarah was writing out lines about the emerging evening stars, the quieting birds, shepherds returning home, the songs of nightingales and the calls of owls, and the spiritual fulfilment available through the crepuscular power of Nature.
Interestingly, when you compare the poems as they appear in Yarrow Revisited (1835) to those written in Sarah’s book, there are notable differences. Entire lines are missing in all three poems, and she sometimes uses different words, for example ‘heaps’ instead of ‘piles’, ‘nature’ instead of ‘beauty’, and ‘genius’ in place of ‘meekness’. This suggests that she wasn’t actually copying from Yarrow Revisited; what is more likely is that she was writing out the poems from memory, making occasional lexical substitutions and accidentally missing out lines. This book intended for children, then, became a living document, a study book, its few blank pages inviting the child to add to the collection three poems she may well have committed to memory, albeit imperfectly.
Another interesting feature of Sarah’s Selections is found in what is absent. In other copies of the book – the Jerwood Centre has a total of six – the final text, an extract from The Excursion, is followed by Hine’s editorial note: ‘I am sorry that space will not allow me to give the reader more of this Divine Poem. “The Excursion” will take rank with the first productions of the British muse. With the Faëry Queen, Paradise Lost, The Essay on Man, The Seasons, The Task, and whatever is worthy of praise and admiration’ (p. 365). In the copy that Wordsworth gifted to his niece, however, this note has been carefully cut out. By whom? we might ask. It might have been young Sarah Hutchinson, but perhaps the excision was made by William, uncomfortable that such comparisons were being made about a poem that was supposed to be only one part of his larger The Recluse, a project that seemed at this point in his life unlikely to be realised. Whatever the case, someone found the adulation inappropriate in a book for children. Instead of being compared to Spenser, Milton, Pope, Thomson, and Cowper, we now read – perhaps with some irony – the words of the advertisement on the next page: ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’.
In 1833, Juvenile Poems for Young Children was published in Boston.[7] This collection of poetry by William and Dorothy was entirely different to Hine’s publication. Containing only eleven poems in large text type, accompanied by illustrations, and totalling just 94 pages, the book was probably much more appealing to a younger audience. Structural features were added, such as the breaking up of ‘The Idiot Boy’ into six sections, perhaps to offer moments of rest for young readers. The last three poems in this collection – ‘The Cottager to her Infant’, ‘The Mother’s Return’, and ‘Address to a Child’ – were written by Dorothy Wordsworth, and they all involve speakers addressing infants. For example, in the latter poem, a mother warns her infant that they are safe, despite the boisterous winter weather blowing hard against their cottage: ‘—But let him range round; he does us no harm, / We build up the fire, we’re snug and warm’ (p. 93).
Young readers are invited to psychologically inhabit the infantile identities in the verses and so emotionally participate in the feelings of warmth, cosiness, and safety that are engendered. However, the language in Dorothy’s verses is not much different to that found in her brother’s, which – included alongside Dorothy’s poems – suddenly seem as though they were always meant for children. When William’s poems involve children, though, their function shifts: they remind child readers about their innate wisdom, which older people have lost. The perspective of the child in ‘We Are Seven’, for example, encourages a young reader to maintain an unwavering belief in the Christian afterlife; ‘On Lying’ highlights the need to disregard adult tendencies to demand tangible explanations for emotional connections to places; and ‘The Idiot Boy’ depicts a mentally disabled child figure who can bring about healing and perhaps see into the life of things during his nightly wanderings. The child reader is invited to celebrate their own childish state, to positively resist the societal pressure towards maturity that Hine’s collection enacted.
Six years later, William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s poems also featured in Select Poetry for Children: With Brief Explanatory Notes Arranged for the Use of Schools and Families (1839), compiled and edited by Joseph Payne.[8] Interspersed alongside poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Robert Southey, Mary Howitt, and many others, ten of William’s poems are included: ‘Incident, characteristic of a Favourite Dog’, ‘The Kitten and the Falling Leaves’, ‘Lucy Gray’, ‘Lines for a Child’s Album’, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, ‘The Pet Lamb’, ‘The Robin Pursuing a Butterfly’, ‘The Strid’, and ‘We Are Seven’. Dorothy’s ‘Loving and Liking’ is also included. Interestingly, many of the poems are heavily edited. ‘The Kitten and the Falling Leaves’, for examples, is missing the first two lines, ‘That way look, my infant, lo! / What a pretty baby-show!’, as well as the second half of the poem (pp. 197–8). It is as though the editor, Payne, purposefully removed the most infantile moments. As with most of the poems in the collection, Payne also included footnotes for certain words. For example, for the lines in which William describes each falling leaf as looking like a ‘wavering parachute’ conveying ‘sylph or fairy’, Hine provides a definition for ‘parachute’: ‘a machine, in form resembling a large umbrella, by which persons may descend from a great height in the air, generally used in connection with an air-balloon’ (p. 198) Imaginative descriptions appealing to infants such as fairies now sit alongside scientific information. And when the speaker compares the kitten to ‘an Indian conjuror’, the reader is also provided with encyclopaedic facts in another footnote: ‘The Indian conjurors perform astonishing feats with balls, keeping several in motion above, and even around them, at the same time’ (p. 198). The poetry, as the collection’s title intimates, serves as a springboard for children to expand their worldly knowledge.
While Hine’s and Payne’s editions were primarily published for the schoolroom or for the more advanced child reader, a new collection in 1862, Wordsworth’s Poems for the Young, attempted to make William and Dorothy’s poems once again more appealing to a younger audience. [9] The single copy of the 1862 edition held by the Jerwood Centre is similar in many ways to the 1833 Boston edition: it uses large text type, wider pages and attempts to maintain the young reader’s attention with illustrations. This new edition, however, is more impressive than its predecessor: the illustrations, unlike many of those in the Boston publication, accurately depict the details and actions of the poems. And the paper is thicker and smoother, perhaps to make it more durable when in the carefree hands of infant readers. Thicker paper notwithstanding, the 1862 copy at the Jerwood Centre shows much wear and tear. The stained pages of Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Address to a Child, During a Boisterous Winter Evening’ have been badly torn and carefully fixed with tape (pp. 43–6). The impatience of the storm in the poem seems to have become manifest in the reading process: not only has the tempest ‘been there, and made a great rout’ (p. 46), but so too, one might infer, has an infant reader. The state of this beautifully bound and visually appealing book, then, offers us clues as to how William and Dorothy’s poems were being read by children. The readers are perhaps much younger than the intended school children for whom Hine’s and Payne’s collections had been published. This book wasn’t meant for the classroom; it was intended for the nursery.
Wordsworth’s Poems for the Young evidently did well: there followed second and third prints, both in 1866, and another 1870 reissue of the 1866 edition.[10] The three copies of the 1866 edition at the Jerwood Centre are variously bound in brilliant red, green, and blue. The cover of the latter copy includes added illustrations and a coloured version of the vignette on the title page, a child absorbed in her book, serving as both a model for the child reader and a visual indicator of the very young readership to whom Wordsworth’s poems were now marketed.
1866 editions of Wordsworth’s Poems for the Young, and the 1870 print (far right).
In 1891, Wordsworth for the Young, edited by Cynthia Morgan St. John, was published in Boston.[11] It is the first, and perhaps only, edition of William and Dorothy’s poems for children with a structure that proceeds from easily accessible to more challenging content for children, both in language and in subject matter. The Prologue to Peter Bell, for example, is included in Part I ‘merely because of its fairy-like-ness, and its probable attractiveness to the young’ (p. 4). Gradually more complex poems are included in Part II. And Part III contains extracts and selections from The Excursion and The Prelude, which might, St. John warns us, be ‘too serious for the average child’ (p. 4). However, St. John hopes that by the end, ‘the charming bits from The Prelude will prove the vestibule to usher the child-reader into the more glorious Cathedral. Then indeed will he be able to discern for himself, and – what is better – possess “that inward eye” which shall make life sweeter and holier’ (p. 4). Wordsworth for the Young recognises that while some of William and Dorothy’s poems are suitable for very young readers, other poems can facilitate the maturation of the child. The first poems in the collection, Dorothy’s ‘The Cottager to her Infant’, ‘Address to a Child’, ‘The Mother’s Return’, and ‘Loving and Liking’ are all accompanied by detailed and engaging illustrations. As the poems become increasingly challenging, the illustrations become less frequent. Ultimately, this collection can be seen as a combination of earlier books of the Wordsworths’ poetry for children: it blends the visual accessibility of Juvenile Poems (1833) and Wordsworth’s Poems for the Young (1862) with the emphasis on maturation in Hine’s Selections (1831) and Payne’s Select Poetry (1839).
In 1893, another collection of the same name, Wordsworth for the Young, was published in London.[12] The editor, J. C. Wright, however, did not structure the book with any pedagogical method in mind. And there are no extracts from The Prelude or The Excursion. The poems are most often those which had featured in former collections of William’s poetry for children; yet, interestingly, none of Dorothy’s poems are included. And there are no illustrations. Wright’s edition, however, is similar to Payne’s collection of poetry in its inclusion of a Notes section at the end of the book. Many of the notes are to explain certain phrases from the poems. For example, for the line ‘Historian of my infancy’ in the poem ‘To a Butterfly’, Wright notes that ‘Here, Wordsworth speaks of a butterfly as if it had a conscious knowledge of himself, and herein he shows himself in sympathy with the lower forms of life. The butterfly reminds him of the happiness of childhood; it is “a solemn image to his heart.”’ Wright is interpreting the lines for the child, not unlike a modern-day study guide. This is a development from Payne, whose notes were limited to providing definitions for words. Here we have a comprehensive and prescriptive guide to understanding what William’s poems ‘meant’.
Collections of William Wordsworth’s poems for children persisted into the twentieth century. William Wordsworth: The Solitary Song: Poems for Young Readers Chosen and Introduced by Edmund Blunden (1970) [13] is 94 pages long and contains illustrations by David Gentleman, which are not unlike those of St. John’s 1891 collection. More recently, Poetry for Young People: William Wordsworth (2003) [14], edited by Alan Liu, includes vivid painted illustrations by James Muir. Like Wright’s collection, Liu includes an introduction to William Wordsworth’s life as well as notes in the form of gloss, providing readers with definitions of unfamiliar words. Regrettably, Blunden and Liu’s recent collections include none of Dorothy’s poems, which – as we have seen – were a consistent feature in the collections for children until Wright’s 1893 publication.
There are many more books containing William and Dorothy’s poetry that could be considered as having been produced with a young audience in mind. I have not, for example, mentioned any of the chapbook publications of ‘We Are Seven’,[15] which could be argued ended up in the hands of as many children as adults. And there are numerous other miscellaneous collections of poems aimed at a young audience that I have yet to thoroughly examine in my research. However, the books that I did get the opportunity to examine at the Jerwood Centre have prompted me to view William and Dorothy’s poetry in a new light. Byron’s and Jeffrey’s facetious criticism of the infantile nature of William Wordsworth’s poems are perhaps not as misguided as has often been thought. William and Dorothy’s poems were, even in their own lifetimes, recognised as apposite for the young mind and, after the poets’ deaths, even appropriate for infant readers.
Being able to examine the books in person at the Jerwood Centre has been invaluable. It’s the subtle details that are so revealing: readers’ additions to the books, torn and mended pages, the careful cutting out of notes, the thickness of paper, even the presence of smudges. They are reminders that examining texts physically is crucial if you truly want to get closer to the reading experiences of previous generations – digitised and scanned online copies can never quite provide you with full access to the subtleness bound up within the material nature of books. Indeed, the Jerwood Centre holds books that (at the time of writing) are not even accessible online, such as Juvenile Poems for Young Children (1833). No doubt the library’s impressive collection of books for children holds many more clues. By examining and comparing the texts closely, one can gain a better understanding of how William and Dorothy’s poems were being marketed to and read by young readers in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Notes
1 George Gordon Byron, ‘Poems, by W. Wordsworth’, in Monthly Literary Recreations, or, Magazine of General Information and Amusement (London: B. Crosby and Co., 1807), ii, 65–66.
2 Francis Jeffrey, ‘Art XIV. Poems, in Two Volumes’, in The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal: For October 1807…..January 1808 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co.; Constable, Hunter, Park & Hunter, 1809), xi, 214–31.
3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions’, in The Major Works, ed. by H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 155–482 (p. 315).
4 William Wordsworth, Selections from the Poems of William Wordsworth, Esq,. Chiefly for the Use of Schools and Young Persons, ed. by Joseph Hine (London: Edward Moxon, 1831).
5 William Wordsworth, Selections from the Poems of William Wordsworth, Esq,. Chiefly for the Use of Schools and Young Persons: A New Edition, ed. by Joseph Hine (London: Edward Moxon, 1834).
6 See Mary Wordsworth, The Letters of Mary Wordsworth: 1800–1855, ed. by Mary E. Burton (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 365 for a family tree of the Hutchinsons.
7 William Wordsworth, Juvenile Poems for Young Children (Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman, and Holden, 1833).
8 Joseph Payne, Select Poetry for Children: With Brief Explanatory Notes Arranged for the Use of Schools and Families (London: Relfe and Fletcher, 1839).
9 William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poems for the Young (London: Alexander Strahan & Co., 1862). Although the title page states 1863 as its publication date, it appears to have been available from December 1862, as noted by Mark L. Reed in A Bibliography of William Wordsworth: 1787–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 354–8.
10 See Reed (pp. 354–8) for details about these editions.
11 William Wordsworth, Wordsworth for the Young. Selections with an Introduction for Parents and Teachers by Cynthia Morgan St. John (Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1891).
12 William Wordsworth, Wordsworth for the Young., ed. by J. C. Wright (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1893).
13 William Wordsworth, The Solitary Song: Poems for Young Readers Chosen and Introduced by Edmund Blunden, ed. by Edmund Blunden (London: The Bodley Head, 1970).
14 William Wordsworth, Poetry for Young People: William Wordsworth, ed. by Alan Liu (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2003).
15 The Jerwood Centre holds two copies of the following: William Wordsworth, The Little Maid and The Gentleman; Or, We Are Seven (York: Printed by J. Kendrew, c. 1820).
Daniel Brocklehurst is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Sydney, 
researching the dynamics of learning and teaching in the poetry of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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