Ireland & the English Lake Poets

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ireland was integrated into a burgeoning domestic tourism. British and Irish tourists in search of ‘the Picturesque’ availed themselves of improved or newly constructed roads and canals, benefitting from the development of steamboats, stage coaches, mail coaches, post-chaises, and, later, rail transport. Maps, guides, travelogues, prints, and local antiquarian histories were produced in large quantities. It was also the age of the Ordnance Survey (Ireland was comprehensively mapped from 1824 to 1846).

Ireland’s case was particularly intriguing. On the one hand, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808–1834) fostered a romantic view of a country whose glories were gone with ‘the light of other days’. On the other, a series of events pressingly underscored Ireland’s problematic relationship to Britain: the United Irishmen’s 1798 rebellion, Robert Emmet’s 1803 rising, and Captain Rock’s agrarian disturbances in the 1820s. The Union, and then the debates about Catholic Emancipation, not only incorporated Ireland into a British sense of nationhood but also brought its ineradicable differences to the fore.

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In 1823, Edward Quillinan (1791–1851), a Roman Catholic born to Irish parents in Portugal, published a book of entertaining verse epistles, entitled Shamrock Leaves, or, The Wicklow Excursion. One of the notes in this book mentions Wordsworth, Quillinan’s future father-in-law. Wordsworth's ‘Muse', Quillinan says,

‘never seems to have reminded him that there was in the West beauty made for song, and yet unsung; that only a narrow channel separated his own romantic coast from scenery as fine as that of Rydal, or Borrowdale, or Ulswater [places in the English Lake District] ...’

In late August 1829, Wordsworth, aged 59, did cross the ‘narrow channel’. His travelling companions were John Marshall (MP for Yorkshire) and Marshall’s son James. The friends ‘bowled away’ from the Lake District in Marshall’s carriage to Holyhead, via Chroley and Llangollen. They took the ‘Holyhead Pacquet’ and, after ‘a quiet passage’, arrived in Howth (9 miles from Dublin) on 30 August.

They then toured Ireland along a clock-wise route, finally reaching the port of Donaghadee, Co. Down, on 3 October. From there they returned to the Lakes via Portpatrick in Scotland.

Travelling in a ‘carriage and four’, they spent five weeks in Ireland, where they visited glens, rivers, loughs, abbeys, churches, castles, and demesnes, as well as Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Derry/Londonderry, and Belfast.

Along the way, Wordsworth kept up with friends and made new acquaintances. Remarkably, he also conquered Carrauntoohil with the young James Marshall.


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Caesar Otway (1780–1842), a Church of Ireland clergyman, was the author of Sketches in Ireland (1827), a travel book that Wordsworth read with ‘great pleasure’ prior to his Irish tour of 1829. In Dublin, Otway gave Wordsworth ‘a map of Ireland in two parts on Silk’. Together with William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), he accompanied the poet to Glendalough. Later in life, Otway recalled Wordsworth’s comment on the ‘ill treatment’ of horses in Ireland as the thing that had ‘most struck his observation’.

Otway’s Sketches in Ireland shows a keen interest in Irish history, landscapes, and local traditions. At times, however, his descriptions are coloured by religious prejudices.

Here we see a sharp contrast between St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg and the Protestant settlement of Enniskillen on Lough Erne. For Otway, the former was ‘the monstrous birth of a dreary and degraded [Catholic] superstition’, whilst the latter was ‘like the Island Queen of all the loyalty, and industry, and reasonable worship that ha[d] made her sons the admiration of past and present time’.

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The Lake Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter Sara (1802–1852) had profound Irish sympathies. In the introduction to her 1850 edition of her father’s Essays on His Own Times, she discoursed at great length on Ireland, its condition, and its national character.

There, she employed striking metaphors of trees that had a special currency in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century debates about Ireland. For Sara Coleridge, whilst the present age is like ‘a tree of rapid growth and showy bloom’, we should not be blind to ‘past oppression’.

She compares these ‘knotted thorns of past oppression’ to Dante’s ghoulish Wood of the Self-Murderers in the Inferno, where the souls of suicides are transformed into trees and are tormented there by Harpies; after the Last Judgement, the bodies that were relinquished in life will be hung from the trees.

Sara Coleridge goes on to highlight the suicidal theme: ‘Truly murderous was that oppression; nay, if Erin is, as Berkeley affirms, “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,” it might be called suicidal, and represented in spectral vision as a huge black-thorn bearing the semi-animate mangled body of “poor Ireland.”’

Here, the ‘mangled body’ is to bear perpetual witness to England’s oppression, which can only redound upon itself.

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Robert Southey (1774–1843) lived in Keswick and was one of the Lake Poets. He had travelled to Ireland in 1801 – he called it ‘the dear Land of Pistols & Potatoes’ – to serve briefly as private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, Isaac Corry (1753–1813).

Southey’s letters from Ireland betray a mind steeped in prejudices and stereotypes. He said that if his scientist friend Humphry Davy could procure an Irishman ‘in his laboratory’, ‘he could analize his flesh blood & bones into nothing but potatoes & buttermilk & whiskey’.

As Poet Laureate, Southey wrote a New Year’s Ode for 1822. Entitled ‘Ireland’, this ode praises George IV, who had visited Ireland in the summer of 1821, as the harbinger of a ‘perfect union’ between Britain and its ‘Sister Isle’. George IV’s visit was satirised by many writers, including Byron in ‘The Irish Avatar’, and the fair promises he held out to the Irish Catholics were in fact delusive.

Southey, however, chose to describe the euphoria that the royal visit had occasioned, envisioning the eventual triumph of the Church of Ireland over the combined forces of ‘the Romanist’, ‘the sons of Schism’, ‘the unbelieving crew’, and ‘Faction’s wolfish pack’. He compared this Anglican victory to Arthur’s defeat of Orgoglio and Duessa (symbolic of Pride and the Roman Catholic Church respectively) in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Also included in the ode is a list of Irish (or Anglo-Irish) men Southey admired at that time: William Bedell, Jeremy Taylor, James Butler, Robert Boyle, George Berkeley, Edmund Burke, and the Duke of Wellington.

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Maria Edgeworth’s first novel, Castle Rackrent, made a profound impact on the literary landscape upon its publication in 1800, and it continues to be widely read and celebrated today. Offering its readers insight into life in Ireland and the manners of the Irish population, the novel has been awarded a plethora of accolades, including being declared the first regional novel, while Edgeworth’s contributions to Romanticism and to Irish literature were widely celebrated in 2018 on her 250th anniversary.

Castle Rackrent immediately found an extensive audience in Britain, and it is mentioned by Robert Southey in his correspondence, as well as praised by Coleridge’s only daughter Sara, an author and translator, who highlights its ‘genuine humour’.

Although feted across Europe, the author’s gender excluded her from membership of many public institutions, although Edgeworth later became one of the Royal Irish Academy’s first female honorary members when she was elected towards the end of her life, in 1842, during William Rowan Hamilton’s presidency of the RIA. Hamilton proposed his friend William Wordsworth to the academy during the same decade, and four years after Edgeworth, Wordsworth was also elected honorary member, in 1846, the achievements of both writers being officially recognised within Ireland.

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Wordsworth was against Catholic Emancipation. In March 1829, half a year before his Irish journey, he wrote to the Bishop of London, describing Catholicism as a ‘soul-degrading faith’, and Irish Catholics as ‘swarms of degraded people’. However, Wordsworth’s views of Catholicism were more complex than a simple gut reaction.

In 1822, he published Ecclesiastical Sketches, a sequence of sonnets tracing the origins and progress of the Church in England. The sonnet shown here glances critically at Henry VIII’s ‘reckless mastery’ following his break with Roman Catholicism, acknowledging that the Henrician Reformation swept away both good and evil.

But here Wordsworth also alludes to John Milton’s Paradise Lost in mocking those Catholic trappings that, in his opinion, mislead believers. Milton portrays how a ‘violent cross-wind’ blows ‘Eremites, and Friars / White, Black, and Grey, with all their trumpery’ to ‘a Limbo large, and broad, since called / The Paradise of Fools’.

Borrowing from Milton, Wordsworth says that those ‘Bulls, pardons, relics, cowls’ were not worth retaining, however much we lament the violence of the Reformation.

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Coleridge’s most carefully formulated response to the Catholic Question was On the Constitution of the Church and State.

Here, he attributes the ‘evil’ of the Irish situation to imperfections in the conquest of Ireland by Britain. Whilst the Romans had effectively sought to pacify the conquered, Britain pursued the laws of ‘exclusion and disqualification’ for their own sake, without any consideration of the ultimate aim of ‘general tranquillity’.

The ‘evil’ having been introduced, the Catholic Relief Bill could at best only mitigate it. For Catholic Emancipation to work positively, Coleridge claimed that it had to rest on one single principle which possesses the character of an ‘ultimatum’: the Roman Catholic priesthood should be excluded from the National Church.

Coleridge’s definition of the National Church is broad. Whilst the object of the State is to ‘reconcile the interests of permanence with that of progression – law with liberty’, the aim of the National Church is to ‘secure and improve that civilisation, without which the nation could be neither permanent nor progressive’. For Coleridge, Roman Catholic priests could not fulfil their role in the national interest because of their ‘allegiance to a foreign power’.

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In June 1827, William Rowan Hamilton was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. Shortly afterwards, he made the acquaintance of the Scottish civil engineer Alexander Nimmo in Armagh. With Nimmo, he toured Limerick, Killarney, Cork, Youghal, Dungannon, Waterford, and Dunmore before taking a steamboat from Waterford to Bristol. This was a significant event for Hamilton, not least because he met Wordsworth in the Lake District during the tour.

But Hamilton also developed other interests along the way. He said to Nimmo: ‘I have long looked on nature with a poet’s eye […]; I am now beginning to look upon it with a painter’s, too. Ludicrous as my present attempts in drawing may be, they serve to make me enjoy, in a far higher and more definite manner than formerly, the visible beauties of Nature and of Art.’

In Killarney, Hamilton had met the famous painter John Glover, who let him ‘look on while he was taking several sketches’. Hamilton himself kept a sketchbook during this tour. Displayed here is his sketch of Coniston Water and the Old Man of Coniston in the Lake District.

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William Rowan Hamilton devoted himself to mathematics but never ceased to read and write poetry.

In 1829, he was engaged in an argument with the novelist Maria Edgeworth’s half-brother Francis (1809–1846) over the relative importance of science and poetry. Whilst Hamilton saw beauty in science, Francis Edgeworth insisted that the ‘intense unity’ in works of art could not be found in mathematics.

When Wordsworth visited Hamilton at Dunsink Observatory in the summer of 1829, they discussed a passage in Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) which ‘did not quite please [Hamilton] by its slight reverence for Science’. Hamilton maintained that ‘the Intellectual faculties held equal rank at least with the Imaginative’.

In the early 1830s, Hamilton again responded to Wordsworth in his introductory lectures on astronomy. These lectures were delivered at Trinity College Dublin in Michaelmas Term annually. Written poetically, they were attended not only by undergraduates but also by cultural figures, including the poet Felicia Hemans.

The 1831 lecture shown here contains two long quotations from The Excursion. Hamilton quoted these passages approvingly, but he subtly shifted their bearings in order to propound the importance of science. He wanted to invest science with an imaginative stature which Francis Edgeworth had refused to recognise, and which Wordsworth, he thought, had inadequately acknowledged in The Excursion.

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In the early 1840s, Eliza Hamilton wrote two sonnets addressed to Wordsworth. In 1830, she had left a poem in Wordsworth’s daughter Dora’s album, beginning ‘It is not now that I can speak’. Ten years on, with the giddiness of joy having settled into calm reflection, Eliza Hamilton tried to ‘speak’ but was conscious of her lack of poetic power. The poem looks back on her visit in 1830, when

‘Life was one sea of glory o’er whose breast
Glided entranced thy young enthusiast guest’.

The memories of Wordsworth’s ‘melodious home’ are still vivid – all the remembered ‘smiles’ are still ‘cloudlessly sweet’ – but she is afraid of disturbing Wordsworth with too ardent feelings and is aware that she cannot convey ‘half of all that lives’ in her breast.

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An immensely famous poet in her time, Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) was born in Liverpool, was brought up in Wales, and was connected to Ireland. Her paternal grandfather was from Co. Cork, and her brother George Baxter was appointed a magistrate in Kilkenny in 1830 and then Chief Commissioner of Police in Ireland in 1831.

In the summer of 1830, Hemans visited Wordsworth in the Lake District, where she also met William Rowan Hamilton and his sister Eliza. Hemans moved to Ireland permanently in April 1831. In Dublin she attended Hamilton’s introductory lectures on astronomy at Trinity College, which inspired her ‘Prayer of the Lonely Student’ (1832).

She also corresponded with Irish luminaries, including the Irish novelist Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson) and Richard Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin.

In 1830, Wordsworth had called Hemans ‘a great Enthusiast both in Poetry and music’. In Dublin she enjoyed the organ music in St Patrick’s Cathedral – ‘All is of Heaven!’, as she described it – and she relished Niccolò Paganini’s virtuosic performances at the Musical Festival in 1831.

Hemans dedicated her Scenes and Hymns of Life to Wordsworth in 1834; many of her poems of the Dublin years have a Wordsworthian flavour and even use Wordsworth for their epigraphs. Hemans died in 1835 and was buried in St Anne’s Church in Dawson Street, Dublin.

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In Ireland, Felicia Hemans visited many places outside of Dublin, especially the tourist attractions in Co. Wicklow, such as the Devil’s Glen, Glendalough, Powerscourt, and Lough Bray.

Whilst staying with her brother in Kilkenny in the summer of 1831, she paid a visit to Woodstock, where the poet Mary Tighe (1772–1810) had spent the last few months of her life. Hemans also went to see Mary Tighe’s mausoleum in the nearby churchyard of Inistioge.

A few years previously, Hemans had commemorated Tighe in ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ (first published in 1827). There, she derives consolation from the thought that Tighe, who has ‘left sorrow in [her] song’, is now in a place where ‘changeful hours’ hold no ‘sway’.

After her visit to Inistioge in 1831, Hemans composed ‘Written after Visiting a Tomb’. In it, she addresses a ‘bright butterfly’ whose ‘reckless and joyous’ existence sharply contrasts with the ‘burden of mortal sufferings’ that she and her sister poet have borne.

In another poem associated with Mary Tighe – ‘Lines Written for the Album at Rosanna’ – Hemans visits the ‘deep chestnut-bowers’ of Rosanna, Tighe’s former residence in Co. Wicklow. Hemans asks her fellow visitors to tread softly so that Tighe’s ‘ideal presence’ may ‘Float around and touch the woods with softer green / And o’er the streams a charm, like moonlight, shed’.

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Writing to his sister Eliza from Edgeworthstown on 23 September 1829, Hamilton described how much he and Francis Edgeworth (the novelist’s half-brother, a young man with literary and philosophical leanings) had enjoyed talking with Wordsworth.

Hamilton also mentioned that Maria Edgeworth, despite her illness, had ‘exhibited in her conversations with Mr. Wordsworth a good deal of her usual brilliancy; she also engaged Mr. Marshall in some long conversations upon Ireland; and even Mr. Marshall’s son, whose talent for silence appears to be so very profound, was thawed a little on Monday evening’ (they left on Tuesday morning).

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Writing to her aunt in late September 1829, however, Maria Edgeworth criticised Wordsworth for his ‘superfluity of words’, even though she also saw ‘a vein of real humour’ under ‘all this slow, slimy, circumspect tiresome lengthiness’.

She described John Marshall’s ivory-like paleness and reported his spending a colossal amount of money on a recent election, though she thought he was ‘a remarkably liberal man in all his views for Ireland’.

Regarding James Marshall, she said: ‘I charitably suspect [he had] more in him than came out’.

But she was ‘glad’ it was ‘becoming more the fashion for English travellers to visit Ireland’.

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The travelling companions whom Edgeworth commented upon so wryly were John Marshall (1765–1845) and his son James (1802–1873). John Marshall was a wealthy flax spinner from Leeds. His wife Jane (née Pollard) was a childhood friend of Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet’s sister.

In 1815, Marshall bought Hallsteads, an estate on Ullswater which the Wordsworths often visited. The Marshall family also owned other substantial lands in the Lake District. With Wordsworth’s assistance, James Marshall was to become the owner of Tarn Hows (near Coniston Water) in 1835, which was visited by the Irish writers Aubrey de Vere and William Allingham, amongst others.

John Marshall was engaged in various social and educational enterprises in Leeds and beyond. As MP for Yorkshire from 1826 to 1830, he entertained many opinions that Wordsworth frowned upon: he promoted utilitarianism and parliamentary reform and voted for Catholic relief.

The late 1820s was a transitional period for the flax-spinning industry. Marshall & Co. were beginning to adapt to new methods of wet spinning, and one of Marshall’s purposes in Ireland was to look for new markets. Belfast – which was at that time witnessing a revival of the linen trade – was an obvious destination.

A note in The Belfast Commercial Chronicle (7 October 1829) mentions Wordsworth but focuses on Marshall’s optimistic view of ‘the forward movement’ in the Irish linen trade.

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