The Real Wordsworth

Dear A. S. Byatt,

While researching my forthcoming book Royal Flush: A Plumbing History of Buckingham Palace, I made a chance discovery that could shake the world of Romantic criticism to its foundations.

Last month I was in the University of Auckland (New Zealand) library checking the Oxford English Dictionary for the earliest recorded usage of the word “plumber” so spelled, with a “b” instead of a double “m”, which spelling had been found as early as 1387. The OED cited a line of verse, printed in 1797, by the otherwise forgotten poet Arthur Dewhurst, as the first usage of our modern spelling: “A plumber did my soup once steal”.

Now this line seemed somehow familiar to me, and I was convinced I had read it or something very like it before. There were, it transpired, just three surviving copies (one in the Bodleian, one in the Folger, and one in a private collection) of Dewhurst’s only published collection of verse entitled Epitaphs for Eatables, one of which (the Bodleian) had been used to create an electronic facsimile for a new database, POETBASE, which fortunately the University of Auckland subscribed to.

The Dictionary of National Biography has a very cursory entry for Dewhurst which reveals that the poet disappeared in mysterious circumstances in January 1798 and was never heard of again. The relevant poem was the first in a modest collection of twenty-four:

“A plumber did my soup once steal”

A plumber did my soup once steal;

He made real all my fears.

It seem’d something more than a meal;

Its bowl now holds my tears.

No potion have I now, no sauce;

No dregs or gritty lees;

Would that the plumber feel remorse

For my beef stock and grease!

I read and re-read this curio, this oddity of late eighteenth-century literature, growing more and more suspicious of its authenticity. And then I had it: the poem contained definite echoes of another poem of exactly the same length and rhyme scheme, a poem I reproduce below:

“A slumber did my spirit seal”

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seem’d a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

This poem, as you well know of course, was printed in 1798 in the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have since gained permission from Dewhurst’s estate to catalogue the never-before edited papers that were found at the poet’s Lake District residence after his disappearance. They make fascinating reading, but the following unsent letter in particular transfixed me:

19 December, 1797

Dear Charles,

I had marvellous revels at the Fawcett Inn with Danforth and Grimsby last night, who brought with them a young poetaster—Wordswithe, or some such name. My memory of the evening is by no means complete, due to (even for me) rather intemperate consumption, but I do recall regaling the party with a fine recitation of my ‘A plumber did my soup once steal’, and that Wordswothe chap continuously scrawling away what seemed like the whole blessed evening . . .

Looking closely at Epitaphs for Eatables I was astonished to find that every one of the twenty-four poems (the same number published as being by Wordsworth in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads), poems completely unconsidered by Romantic scholars, contained echoes of “Wordsworthian” diction and meter!

What had I stumbled upon? For millions around the world Wordsworth is the first Romantic, and my discovery has revealed him to be a plagiarist! His appropriation of the works of the unknown poet Arthur Dewhurst who disappeared shortly after their meeting is nothing short of scandalous. I am undecided what to do next, as you might imagine, and would greatly appreciate your expert advice.

Yours anxiously,

New Zealand Gerald

  

PS: I thought your Possession was a remarkably original achievement.