Wordsworth’s views on slavery prove history is complex
This week, the National Gallery published research into its links with slavery. Unsurprisingly, portraitists such as Thomas Lawrence and Thomas Gainsborough were shown to have painted families who were connected to the slave trade, while William Wordsworth was mentioned because his sister, Dorothy, rented a cottage that was leased by a slave owner (he was part of a group who bought a Constable painting for the public, to be displayed at the gallery). These links can be tenuous, and many will see the National Gallery’s research as an act of self-flagellation, while others will see it as an opportunity to chastise the past with little regard for the facts.
But the inclusion of Wordsworth on this list is nevertheless worth some consideration, and demonstrates that there is a nuanced conversation to be had about attitudes to slavery and colonialism in the 19th century. His is a complex and sometimes contradictory stance which reflects the fluctuating attitudes of the time, and the changing views of the Romantics.
Certainly, the young Wordsworth could be fresh and idealistic. Take his poem to the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson on the final passing of the bill for the abolition of the slave trade (1807). “Thy zeal shall find/ repose at length, firm friend of human kind.”
Yet, his stance, even in youth, was rarely as clear. Drawn to a sense of the sublime (ie, the use of language to take us outside our more mundane thoughts), he would sometimes sidestep the issue of slavery by focusing on a preoccupation with a sort of transcendental liberty that involved communing directly with nature whatever your physical circumstances. His ode, “To Toussaint, L’ouverture”, reflects on the captured general who steered the Haitian Revolution (of self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule). “Live, and take comfort! Thou hast left behind/ Powers that will work for thee – air, earth, and skies –/ There’s not a breathing of the common wind/ That will forget thee!”
In other words, as long as nature exists, Toussaint’s fight for freedom will never be forgotten, and losing
His abolitionist zeal was often far removed from the practical plight of slaves
yourself in the elements is a way of releasing yourself from bondage. It is a pretty wishy-washy sentiment, and proves that for all Wordsworth’s zeal, he was far removed from thinking about the practical plight of slaves.
Indeed, there are several problems with Wordsworth’s early attitude, only some of which can be excused by the age. He seemed to be wrapped up in the cult of exoticism, and nowhere can this be seen more clearly than when he actually tries to depict a black woman who has been expelled from France by Napoleon (in “September 1, 1802”) and whom he encounters on a return trip from Calais. Her eyes, we are told, “retain a tropic fire”. He is unable to speak freely about his subject, resorts to a sort of awkward and unpoetic description. “Meek, destitute, as seemed, of hope or aim/ She sate, from notice turning not away.”
Here, the woman is a passive victim, as if Wordsworth is unable to picture her as someone who can stand up for herself. But then, it seems reasonable that the 21st-century idea of giving agency to the oppressed was alien to the poet.
It is also likely that Wordsworth, as a man of his time, thought about slavery in terms of a wider tyranny and emblematic of a sort of rivalry with France, a country which he saw as enslaved by Napoleon, as opposed to Britain, whose citizens enjoyed great freedom. “Shame on you, feeble heads, to slavery prone,” he wrote in ‘Calais, August 1802’. In terms of the Haitian revolution, then, it is likely that Wordsworth and many other thinkers of the time used it to oppose the emperor rather than the concept of colonialism.
Whatever ambivalence Wordsworth felt towards colonialism at that time, there is no doubt that politically he shifted towards the Right as he got older. At best, this can be seen as a sort of Tory paternalism in which he felt a responsibility towards the poor. Yet he could also be stiflingly reactionary and was opposed to the wider enfranchisement of working-class men which was laid out in the Great Reform Act of 1832.
As regards the subject of abolition, nothing shows his ambivalence more than his letter to Benjamin Dockray in 1833 as the Slavery Abolition Bill was going through Parliament.
“No man can deplore more than I do a state of slavery in itself. I do not only deplore but I abhor it,” he writes. However, he also expresses his concerns regarding emancipation of slaves and its consequences. “Those who are most active in promoting entire and immediate abolition do not seem sufficiently to have considered that slavery is not in itself and at all times and under all circumstances to be deplored. In many states of society it has been a check upon worse evils; so much inhumanity has prevailed among men that the best way of protecting the weak from the powerful has often been found in what seems at first sight a monstrous arrangement.”
Unthinkable to us, yes, but demonstrative of a clever man wrestling, in his own mind, to overturn one of the most pernicious and embedded evils of his age. Wordsworth was also living through a time of extraordinary tumult, and had been agitated by the march of progress offered by the distinctly unsublime Industrial Revolution. He was by some measure experiencing a crisis of thought. With wealth and fame he had also perhaps realised the appeal and importance of ownership of property, and woefully considered slaves in this context.
What all of this suggests, ultimately, is that Wordsworth’s internal struggle regarding slavery was an evolving battle of good thoughts countered by bad ones. In our presentday race to condemn figures from the past, we would all do well to remember that most of us are conflicted in one way or another – and the past is rarely ruled by homogenous thoughts.