Anorexia, addiction, child-swapping — the Lake Poets would have alarmed social services

The last time the general reader was inveigled into the domestic intensities of the Wordsworth circle was by Frances Wilson in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. She engaged delicately with Dorothy’s inordinate love for her younger brother William, and seemed to think her passionate attachment was romantic and sentimental rather than sexual — though there are 50 shades of grey between the one and the other, and honestly, it doesn’t matter.

Katie Waldegrave, in her riveting family saga The Poets’ Daughters, is not much concerned with that anyway. Her focus is on what happened to Wordsworth’s daughter Dora, the second of his five children, and Coleridge’s youngest, Sara. There were 20 months between them and they were much together as children. Coleridge’s discarded wife dressed Sara in frilly frocks, while Wordsworth believed in children being ‘wild and free’, dressing Dora in sleeveless smocks, preferably Prussian blue. He would have loved denim — though that is just the kind of comment Waldegrave does not make, being scrupulous about not imposing 21st-century perceptions and attitudes on her narrative.

Anyone coming to the story of the domestic life and emotional ramifications of the Lake Poets for the first time, however, may reflect that nowadays these intertwined families, enmeshed in a spider’s web of relationships ‘built on love and envy, rivalry and fierce loyalty’, might have had social services breathing down their necks.

Wordsworth and Coleridge, the two great poets of their day, were close friends, collaborators and quarrelers. Wordsworth was tall, tanned and fit. Coleridge, who believed his friend was the most important English poet since Milton, was short, fat and puffy-faced, addicted to opium — but then so were they all, just about, whether young or old, male or female. Children were added and subtracted between households, cared for by assorted aunts as well as parents.