Wordsworth Summer Conference: John Gardner on 'Wordsworth's Sites of Massacre'

Professor John Gardner (Anglia Ruskin University) reflects on his Wordsworth Summer Conference keynote lecture, ‘Wordsworth's Sites of Massacre’. In this conference Q&A with Amanda Blake Davis, Professor Gardner discusses the second-generation Romantics' reactions to Wordsworth's depictions of war and violence, and the effects of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre upon the Romantics' thoughts.

Wordsworth’s ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ (1816) provoked charged responses from the second-generation Romantics, particularly in reaction to the line addressed to God: ‘Yea, Carnage is thy Daughter’. Your lecture considered Byron, Hazlitt, and Shelley’s responses to this line in particular. Could you expand upon the second-generation Romantics’ use of allusion to the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, and is allusion used to express enmity?Wordsworth is not an anti-war poet. He stated: ‘My whole soul was resolved to fight it out against Bonaparte’ (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1967, II, 334). In The Prelude Wordsworth declares he ‘Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come!’ (X, 274). Wordsworth’s ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ became notorious. Leigh Hunt attacked Wordsworth for the ‘approving phrase’ ‘Yea Carnage is thy daughter’ rhyming with ‘mutual slaughter’: ‘How poor and wilful, how presumptuous, and at the same time misgiving,—how full of a pretended right to say the boldest and most shocking things unexplained […] because he has might and orthodoxy on his side’ (Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, 1828, I, p. 221.) Hazlitt picks up on this too: ‘“Carnage is thy daughter.” Poetry is right-royal. It puts the individual for the species; the one above the infinite many, might before right.’ (Works, IV, pp. 214-215). As Douglas B. Wilson notes, ‘Although Hazlitt is writing about Coriolanus, his remarks disclose their relevance to Wordsworth’s affinity for power’ (The Romantic Dream: Wordsworth and the Poetics of the Unconscious, p. 114). Byron sardonically spikes the lines in Don Juan:

“Carnage” (so Wordsworth tells you) “is God’s daughter:”If he speak truth, she is Christ’s sister, andJust now behaved as in the Holy Land(8. 9)

Shelley adapts Wordsworth’s lines in Peter Bell the Third, where Peter becomes a propagandist for the devil, writing odes based on Wordsworth’s ‘Thanksgiving Ode’:

Then Peter wrote odes to the Devil—In one of which he meekly said:“May Carnage and Slaughter,Thy niece and thy daughter,May Rapine and Famine,Thy gorge ever cramming,Glut thee with living and dead! “May death and damnation,And consternation,Flit up from hell with pure intent!Slash them at Manchester,Glasgow, Leeds, and Chester;Drench all with blood from Avon to Trent!(Peter Bell the Third, 634-646)

Shelley seems to suspect that the classical tradition of poetry, as exemplified by the ode with which Wordsworth celebrated the victory at Waterloo (which is also the tradition within which Shelley works in poems such as Prometheus Unbound), is linked with the kind of repression that was Peterloo. For Hunt, Hazlitt, Hone, Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth now serves repressive physical power, like the ‘Slop Merchant’ Dr John Stoddart of the Loyal Association, only with more talent, and they despise him for that.Mary and William Wordsworth visited St. Peter’s Field in Manchester in May 1820, less than one year after the Peterloo massacre, where Mary noted that William was ‘not inclined to see anything further’ and remained ‘silent and looked ill’. Your lecture drew attention to Wordsworth as a sort of dark tourist, addicted to going to sites of massacre. Could you expand upon the significance of Wordsworth’s visit to the site of Peterloo, and the causes of his unsettled reaction?Wordsworth was attracted to sites of massacre. From imagining ancient Britons warring on Sarum’s Plain, Wordsworth went on to visit slaughter-sites in Paris, Waterloo and St. Peter’s Field. But what drew Wordsworth to places ‘where the dust / Was laid with tears’? In May 1820, on their way to Waterloo, William and Mary stopped in Manchester and were shown the scene of the Peterloo massacre by an eye-witness. Mary has William disconcerted by the experience:

After we had taken tea, with a slice of Cold Beef for Wm., we transferred our luggage from the Star—took a walk, and inspected Peterloo; the particulars of the Stations of the Performers, the ground upon which certain feats were wrought, etc., we learned from a Person upon the spot, who had witnessed the whole scene. William was not inclined to see any thing further.

The next day they travelled with a Manchester Magistrate  who was ‘most agreeable […] quite a gentleman of the right sort of principles. His presence cheered up Wm.’ (Letters of Mary Wordsworth, 1958, letter 29, pp. 55-56). What did Wordsworth think of Peterloo? Mary Moorman has written that ‘Wordsworth thought Peterloo a necessary action to preserve the peace, although he thought that there might have been “some mismanagement” on the part of the Manchester magistrates’ (Moorman, Wordsworth: The Later Years, 1968, p. 361). I think there is a nod to Peterloo in his poem ‘September 1819’ where he writes of ‘[…] undiscordant themes; / Which, haply, kindred souls may prize’ (21-22). The mention of ‘the live chords Alcæus smote’ (38) alludes to a battle between civilians. Alcaeus, also a political poet, had rebelled against the rulers of Lesbos and took part in a civil war.  Wordsworth’s attitude to Peterloo is further revealed when, staying with the Beaumonts at Coleorton in Winter 1820, he discovered that ‘a schoolmaster at the local grammar school had set the “Manchester Massacre” as a theme for his boys. “What”, asked Wordsworth, “are we to expect from children educated by such teachers?”’ (Moorman, p. 361).Scenes of battle are a common enough attraction for many, but what did Wordsworth need from visiting these sites?

1. Wordsworth was not against war as he says in ‘Anticipation. October 1803’: ‘And even the prospect of our Brethren slain, / Hath something in it which the heart enjoys’ (12-13). In ‘After Visiting the Field of Waterloo’ Wordsworth writes: ‘We felt as Men should feel, / With such vast hoards of hidden carnage near’ (3. 429). Wordsworth sounds like Boswell’s Johnson: ‘We talked of war.  Johnson: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.”’ (Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 267).
2. Perhaps for Wordsworth the sublime nature of war and massacre provides the feeling of pleasure that Burke describes, the sort of excitement a lover of true crime might get. Was it the thrill of being close to danger yet safe from it? With Peterloo it is different. Here Wordsworth feels uneasy when shown around by a witness. It is likely to have been a demonstrator, someone Wordsworth might have felt commonality with 25 years earlier. He is easier with the magistrate rather than the person who showed him around. Wordsworth had joined the Grasmere Volunteers, wore the uniform, and drilled with them. Maybe he was discomfited by finding that he identified more with a Yeomanry soldier, than a protester.
3. Death inspires Wordsworth’s verse. He is obsessed by death and memorials, and, excepting Peterloo, he responds with poetry. Community inspires ‘A sensitive being, a creative’ (1850, XII, 207). Even the place where ‘[…] in former times / A murderer had been hung in chains’ (XII, 236) produces verse.
4. Perhaps Wordsworth went to sites of massacre to spiritually converse with the dead. The Prelude has Wordsworth find there is ‘One great society alone on earth: / The noble living and the noble dead’ (X, 969-70), and ‘The Convention of Cintra’ has Wordsworth say there is a ‘spiritual community binding together the living and the dead’.

 Maybe all of these reasons attracted Wordsworth to sites of massacre.

John Gardner is Professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University. He is the author of Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) in addition to numerous articles and chapters on Hone, Cobbett, Lamb, Byron and Shelley. He is a recipient of the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2019 for his current project Turning the Screw: Literature, Technology and Culture.