The Wordsworths, the Greens, and the limits of sympathy.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-03

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ON MARCH 19, 1808, GEORGE AND SARAH GREEN, HUSBAND AND WIFE, perished in Langdale Fell during a storm, leaving behind eight orphaned children, all under the age of sixteen and six under age eleven, an event which threw "the whole vale," in Dorothy Wordsworth's words, into "the greatest consternation." (1) Immediately Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth (William was in London) were "employed in laying schemes to prevent the children from falling into the hands of persons who may use them unkindly," which they regarded as likely if the children suffered the usual fate of orphans, being boarded out by the parish for a meager two shillings per week. (2) They began to solicit donations, and when William returned to Grasmere the following month the Wordsworths wrote a brief account of the events that they circulated to those who might be willing to contribute. (3) It seems that they were tireless in their efforts, as William was soon apologizing to Francis Wrangham for the "dim transcript made by a multiplying writer, we having had occasion to make so many copies." (4) One month after the tragedy, William sent S. T. Coleridge "Elegiac Stanzas composed in the Churchyard of Grasmere, Westmorland, a few days after the Internment there of a Man and his Wife, Inhabitants of the Vale, who were lost upon the neighbouring Mountains, on the night of the nineteenth of March last." The first lines read: "Who weeps for Strangers?--Many wept / For George and Sarah Green." He urged Coleridge to "turn these verses to any profit for the poor Orphans in any way, either by reciting, circulating in manuscript or publishing them." (5) Dorothy began her own record of the events, Narrative Concerning George and Sarah Green of the Parish of Grasmere addressed to a Friend, in April. Her Narrative was read by family members and close friends but remained unpublished during her lifetime. (6) By the middle of May more than 300 [pounds sterling] had been raised, and by September the subscription for the Green children approached 500 [pounds sterling]. For the next twenty-one years, the distribution of funds to the families who had taken in the orphans was overseen by a group of local women (including Mary Wordsworth), deservedly earning Ernest de Selincourt's praise as "a model of a simple act of charity wisely conceived and scrupulously administered" (11). For William, their involvement with the Greens represented the enormous potential of human sympathy to relieve poverty.

But one could read the story of the Wordsworths' involvement in the Greens' suffering quite differently. The brief account that William and Dorothy wrote immediately after the tragedy to raise money might be examined for the way it establishes rigid requirements for the truly deserving poor. Compassion for the children is "more deeply felt," and there is "a general desire that more than ordinary exertions should be made" because of the parents' "frugality and industry" and "even cheerful endurance of extreme poverty," as well as their independence, for they went "without any assistance from the parish." (7) That the children were deemed more worthy of private assistance because their parents had been "cheerful" in their suffering suggests a far more qualified sympathy for the poor. We might also look at the decision to cap the subscription at 500 [pounds sterling], the subject of some controversy between Coleridge and Wordsworth. While Coleridge's letter on the subject is not extant, from Wordsworth's defensive reply--he felt compelled to offer no less than six reasons, which he enumerates one by one, for his decision to accept no more donations--we may surmise a strong objection on Coleridge's part. Michael Friedman, one of the few scholars to consider William's involvement with the Greens, reads this explanation to Coleridge as exemplifying "a Tory humanist conception of community structured by traditional social rank and degree and a belief that such a hierarchic community must be preserved." (8) There is no thought given by Wordsworth, for example, to raising the children above their prior station, or to maintaining them in the independence that their parents had so staunchly defended. Nor is there any thought given to preserving any of the meager contents of the house, all of which were put up for sale shortly after the funeral. William even decides not to purchase a gravestone for the parents, which, in his view, "to commonplace minds might appear like a fancy or luxury." (9) We might, then, question the sufficiency of the 500 [pounds sterling] "for the purpose of putting the Children forward"; (10) a useful point of comparison may be the yearly expenses of the Wordsworth household, which at [pounds sterling] in 1809, amounted to nearly this entire sum." In this interpretation of events, the more circumscribed nature of the Wordsworths' sympathy is revealed, and with it the limited capacity of private charity to alleviate suffering.

These contradictory readings of the Wordsworths' involvement with the Greens in many ways trace the history of Wordsworth scholarship over the last twenty years, from an idealized to a more critical assessment of Wordsworth's attitudes toward the poor. (12) Indeed for the past two decades this journal has participated in a larger scholarly conversation about the poet's representations of the poor as well as his views of the appropriate individual and institutional responses to poverty. (13) As a corrective to what were seen as highly sentimentalized readings of Wordsworth's poetic encounters with beggars and abandoned women, in the 1980s James Chandler, Marjorie Levinson, and Alan Liu subjected Wordsworth's social politics to greater scrutiny, insisting on his affiliations with late eighteenth-century conservative ideology. (14) In the 1990s, David Simpson, Gary Harrison, and David Bromwich argued for a revised conception of Wordsworth's social poetics, arguing that his poems displayed sympathetic identification, albeit of a complicated nature, with the destitute. (15) These studies and a series of articles in this journal have relied on careful analysis of a small number of "encounter poems," including "The Old Cumberland Beggar," "Michael," "Beggars," "Alice Fell," and "Resolution and Independence," as well as selected scenes from The Prelude and The Excursion. Given how invested criticism of the past twenty years has been in "the charting of the Wordsworthian social conscience," which as R. Clifton Spargo observes "has become a vexed and often divisive endeavor," it is surprising how little attention has been devoted to the poet's actual involvement with an impoverished family, particularly given the rich biographical and literary record of his and Dorothy's involvement with the Greens (54).

While of course the Wordsworths were not political economists, and did not set out their strategies for poor relief systematically, reading their history with the Greens helps bring to light a debate between them about the efficacy of sympathy that offers a more fully historicized analysis of the Wordsworthian social conscience. A close reading of the Narrative suggests not only that Dorothy was, as many critics have observed, an important source of William's poetry on the poor, (16) but that she was also an acute commentator on his views, detecting many of the incoherencies and inadequacies in his positions long before academic scholars began to do so. Dorothy's Narrative, by calling into question her brother's reliance on voluntary action to relieve suffering and by continually drawing our attention to the limits rather than the boundless potential of human sympathy, helps to situate their involvement with the Greens in the discourse on sympathy and poverty that pervaded early nineteenth-century culture. Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) represents the culmination of more than a century of philosophical writing about sympathy, and indeed the apotheosis of sympathy as a driving force in moral theory. Like his good friend David Hume and the "moral sense" theorists before him, Smith posits that the existence of sympathy, or the capacity for "fellow-feeling" which even "the greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society" was not wholly without, not only disproved the "selfish schools" of Hobbes and Mandeville but also enabled principled distinctions between good and bad conduct. (17) The centrality of imagination to Smith's account of sympathy no doubt proved attractive to Wordsworth: "As we can have no immediate experience of what other men feel," Smith wrote, "we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.... [I]t is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations" (3-4). By "entering into the concerns of others," to use Burke's similar formulation for sympathy in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Smith argued that we might determine whether their feelings and actions are virtuous. (18) Hume and Smith thus describe a triadic relationship between spectator, agent, and recipient developed by earlier moral sense theorists, a structure, incidentally, that figures in many of William's encounter poems, with the poet as spectator observing a donor bestowing charity on the needy.

These discussions of sympathy are highly relevant to the "moral crisis" that arose during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century over the treatment of the poor. (19) This crisis--precipitated by a dramatic increase in demand for public relief brought on by economic depression, agricultural shortages, and the war with France--was a moral one in that state provision for the indigent, which had been in effect since Elizabethan times, was called into question. (20) Instigated by works challenging the old poor laws such as Joseph Townsend's 1786 Dissertation on the Poor Laws, Jeremy Bentham's 1798 Pauper Management Improved, and Thomas Malthus' 1798 An Essay on the Principles of Population, the debate would continue to rage for the next four decades "as the middling classes reanalyzed their commitment to support the destitute," ending only with the repeal of the old poor laws in 1834 (Lees 88). Insofar as many of the reformers looked to the exercise of sympathy through charitable giving and benevolent acts as the proper if not exclusive means of redressing penury, their policies seemed to have been informed by the moral theory advanced by Hume and Smith.

The most common complaint lodged against the old poor laws was that they encouraged laziness and dependency and thus created the very problem they were meant to solve. Nearly all of the prominent voices involved in the public debate called for their repeal, though there was little consensus over what was to replace them. For Townsend, the solution was private charity for the very few deserving poor who suffered through no fault of their own; for Bentham, the...

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