From jamesfenton.com

Words Worthy of Peasants

James Fenton
copyright © 2006

Originally published in The Guardian
22 July 2006

To see the peasantry, the rural poor, as Wordsworth saw them is one thing:
the main thing. To see Wordsworth as the peasants saw him is quite another -
in many ways it is a surprise. The Reverend Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley (one
of the founders of the National Trust) noticed that very little interest had
been taken in Tennyson's works or fame in the part of Lincolnshire where he
lived, in the houses of either rich or poor. Moving to the Lake District,
Canon Rawnsley, as he later became known, decided to ask around among local
people who had known Wordsworth and his family, and to set down what they
told him in their words, or as close as possible to their dialect.

He began in 1870, 20 years after the poet's death, and in 1882 he read a
paper in London at the annual meeting of the Wordsworth Society. Robert
Browning was in the chair. This paper was further revised in 1902, but
Rawnsley's Reminiscences of Wordsworth among the Peasantry of Westmoreland
(it was reprinted by Dillons in 1968) is not at all remote from its subject,
as long as we understand that subject to be Wordsworth in old age.

He was not popular. That is, he was shy and retired, and did not mix freely
with the people. He didn't frequent public houses, unlike Hartley Coleridge.
Canon Rawnsley's interviewees invariably think of Hartley as a preferable
character, a friendly man, a great drinker and a philosopher - a being
superior to a poet. Wordsworth's hobby, says one witness, was poetry. "It
was a queer thing, but it would like eneuf cause him to be desolate; and
I'se often thowt that his brain was that fu' of sic stuff, that he was
forced to be always at it whether or no, wet or fair, mumbling to hissel'
along t'roads."

This mumbling, this "continually murmuring his undersong," as Canon Rawnsley
puts it in his politer register, features in the peasants' vocabulary as
"bumming". Here is Wordsworth on the grass walk at Rydal Mount: "... he
would set his heäd a bit forrad, and put his hands behint his back. And then
he would start bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, bum, stop; then bum, bum,
bum reet down till t'other end, and then he'd set down and git a bit o'paper
out and write a bit; and then he git up, and bum, bum, bum, and goa on
bumming for long enough right down and back agean. I suppose, ya kna, the
bumming helped him out a bit."

Another witness: "Mr Wordsworth went bumming and booing about, and she, Miss
Dorothy, kept close behint him, and she picked up the bits as he let 'em
fall, and tak 'em down, and put 'em on paper for him. And you med be very
well sure as how she didn't understand nor make sense out of 'em." Dorothy,
known to all these neighbours as a clever women who perhaps wrote some of
Wordsworth's poems for him, but certainly helped him out with them, is seen
both in her latter days as an invalid, and off her head, and earlier as a
fellow walker with her brother.

"And as for her, why, Miss Wudsworth, she wad often come into t'back kitchen
and exe for a bit of oatcake and butter. She was fond of oatcake, and butter
till it, fit to steal it a'most. Why, why, she was a ter'ble cliver woman,
was that. She did as much of his potry as he did, and went completely off it
at the latter end we' studying it, I suppose." That is, it drove her mad.

That Wordsworth never laughed, or whistled, or sang, but only bummed and
booed his way along the roads, was clearly held against him. He was, they
said, "no mountaineer", stuck to the low roads, never sat on a horse, never
asked people about their work, or noticed the flocks or took any interest in
the farms. He "cared nowt about fwoak, nor sheep, nor dogs". He was never at
feasts or (except on one occasion) at wrestling. He was "a man as hed nea
pleasure in his faace".

But he was universally acknowledged to have been a great skater, who could
cut his name in the ice. "He was a ter'ble girt skater, was Wudsworth now;
and he would put ya [one] hand i' his breast (he wore a frill short i' them
daays), and t'other i' his wäistband, same as shepherds dea to keep their
hands warm, and he would stand up straight and swaay and swing away
grandly."