The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Hinterland
After a trip to revolutionary France, Wordsworth felt only one man could save our benighted nation
Over the years I have alluded in this column to William Wordsworth’s pungent sonnet London, 1802, recognisable from its opening line – “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.” London, 1802, which reflects on the moral decay of England since Milton’s glory days, was not published until 1807, with Britain in the depths of the Napoleonic Wars; yet it was written during a brief respite in an Anglo-French conflict of more than 20 years (the peace of 1802’s Treaty of Amiens, which lasted less than 14 months).
Wordsworth had used the peace to visit France for the first time in years. The best known fruit of that summer of 1802 is his sonnet (majestic and serene rather than pungent) Evening on Calais Beach. It was prompted by his meeting for the first time his nine-year-old daughter Caroline, and a reunion with her mother, Annette Vallon, after a decade. Wordsworth’s liaison with Annette had occurred during his visit to revolutionary France. Perhaps luckily for him he ran out of money and had to go home, leaving his pregnant mistress in the lurch, just before war broke out between the two countries. Similarly, he was wise not to linger in France in 1802-03, for he would have been interned after the declaration of war.
Critics have interpreted London, 1802 not just as a sign of the poet’s developing moralism (he had gone to see Annette not least to warn her of his impending marriage to someone else) but also of his growing Toryism. His love affair with revolutionary France had mirrored a distaste for the somewhat repressive ministry of Pitt the Younger. But Pitt had resigned through ill health in 1801, to be replaced by his colleague Addington, who had concluded Amiens out of desperation because of the collapse of British trade. Wordsworth returned to a country he felt had been humbled by mismanagement.
When Wordsworth writes that Milton is required because “England hath need of thee: she is a fen/ Of stagnant waters” what he alludes to is a country debauched by decadence – as depicted by Hogarth and Gillray, and demonstrated by growing secularism, the harshening of human relations and the loss of a greater sense of purpose. The result is misery, and every part of society is to blame. “Altar, sword and pen,/ Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,/ Have forfeited their ancient English dower/ Of inward happiness.” Milton’s titanic soul can provide the example required to rescue this benighted nation. “We are selfish men;/ Oh! raise us up, return to us again;/ And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”
Perhaps he wishes to discover Milton’s qualities in himself. “Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart./ Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:/ Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.” Religion is essential: “So didst thou travel on life’s common way/ In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart/ The lowliest duties on herself did lay.” The sonnet is written in Miltonic style and diction, and it compares superbly with the poems in that form that Milton himself produced.