Given his reputation as the poet who celebrated domestic life, little
affection for a specific home or homes emerges from Cowper’s poems or
letters. Especially during the years shortly before and after his and Mrs
Unwin’s removal from Olney to Weston, it is striking how he describes
the time at Orchard Side – the place where he lived longer than any
other, for eighteen years – as a period of imprisonment. He writes to
Newton in July 1783 describing himself as
both free and a Prisoner at the same time. The world is before me; I am not
shut up in the Bastile though often as miserable as if I were, there are no Moats
about my castle, nor locks upon my gates but of which I have the Key—but
an invisible uncontroulable agency, a local attachment, an inclination more
forcible than I ever felt even to the place of my Birth, serves me for prison
walls and for bounds which I cannot pass.1
In 1786, writing to Newton of the ‘intended removal’, he refers to the
‘thirteen years that I have been a prisoner,’ implicitly dating this sense of
imprisonment to 1773-4, when he suffered a major breakdown (he and
Mrs Unwin had first moved into Orchard Side in 1768).2 In other letters
to Newton around the time of the move to Weston, he meditates upon his
mixed feelings about Orchard Side, ‘that ruinous abode’, marvelling at
how desolate it looks now, yet also remembering ‘that I had once been
happy there, and could not without tears in my eyes bid adieu to a place
in which God had so often found me’.3
A similar ambivalence characterises Cowper’s attitude towards the
place of his birth, Berkhamsted. Writing to Samuel Rose on 19 October
1787, Cowper recalls returning there, aged 24, at the time of his father’s
death in 1756:
When my Father died I was young; too young to have reflected much. He
was Rector of Berkhamstead, and there I was born. It had never occurred
to me that a parson has no fee-simple in the House and glebe he occupies.
There was neither Tree nor Gate nor stile in all that country to which I did
not feel a relation, and the House itself I preferred to a palace. I was sent for
from London to attend him in his last illness, & he died just before I arrived.
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Then, and not ’till then, I felt for the first time that I and my native place were
disunited for ever. I sighed a long adieu to fields and woods from which I
once thought I should never be parted, and was at no time so sensible of their
beauties as just when I left them all behind me to return no more.4
This nostalgia contrasts with the tone of a letter written to his friend John
Duncombe just a few months after paying another visit to Berkhamsted
(presumably to wind up some of his late father’s affairs) in June 1757, where
the jaunty heartlessness of youth is largely uninflected by nostalgia:
I believe no man ever quitted his Native place with less Regrett than myself,
and were it not for the sake of a Friend or two that I have left behind me, one of
which small Number you will doubtless reckon yourself, I should never wish
to see either the place or any thing that belongs to it again. Notwithstanding
this Jack, you & I have spent many merry hours together in the Parsonage,
my poor Father has often been the better for your Drollery, for you had the
Knack, or the Natural Gift of making him Laugh, when no Creature else
could have done it.5
Changing his tune again, in October 1767 he writes to Mrs Madan
describing a visit made with Newton to a Rev. Mr Moody at Dunton,
12 miles from Berkhamsted, and reports feeling deeply ‘affected’ at the
sight of ‘my Native Place’ which made ‘my Childhood and Youth in
their most affecting Colours pass in review before me’.6
It is with the receipt of his mother’s picture many years later, in
1790, that the most bittersweet memories seem to have come flooding
back, and Cowper describes how ‘I seem t’ have lived my childhood
o’er again, / To have renew’d the joys that once were mine’ (ll. 15-16).7
Elsewhere in this issue of the Cowper and Newton Journal, Vincent
Newey writes eloquently on the poem as a whole; what concerns us
here are the poem’s evocations of Berkhamsted, which seem to have
influenced later local admirers of Cowper to memorialise the parts of
the town with Cowperian associations. The poem recalls the day of his
mother’s funeral, before moving into a more general reminiscence about
his childhood home:
I heard the bell toll’d on thy burial day,
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away,
And, turning from my nurs’ry window, drew
A long long sigh, and wept a last adieu! […]
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Where once we dwelt, our name is heard no more,
Children, not thine, have trod my nurs’ry floor;
And where the gard’ner Robin day by day
Drew me to school along the public way
Delighted with my bawble coach, and wrapt
In scarlet mantle warm and velvet-capt,
’Tis now become a hist’ry little known
That once we call’d the Past’ral house our own.
(ll. 28-31; 46-53)
The small details in the poem contribute to its poignancy. It is generally
acknowledged that ‘gard’ner Robin’ Pope was indeed the Rectory
gardener,8 and the image of the tiny Cowper in his miniature ‘bawble
coach’ is endearing. The dame school he mentions is long gone, its site
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now occupied by part of ‘M and Co.’ at 212 High Street.9 The ‘pastoral
house’ is a slightly peculiar way to describe the substantial Rectory in
which Cowper was born and grew up, but doubtless reflects Cowper’s
idealising memories, as well as the genuinely green and rural environs
which this engraving of the house reproduced in Thomas Wright’s The
Loved Haunts of Cowper (1894)10 suggests. Note how the artist has
placed little William and his mother on the lawn in the foreground, with
his little wheelbarrow beside her, and his hoop and stick. The gardening
implements next to the flowerbed, while no doubt left there by ‘gard’ner
Robin’, are suggestive of his adult passion for horticulture.
The poem’s sad reflections upon how ‘little known’ he and his family
must now be in Berkhamsted recall a passage from one of Cowper’s
letters, written a little over a year earlier to Mrs King, describing how,
by pure chance, he has recently come across a piece of newspaper used
as padding in a parcel of books:
This thought struck me very forcibly the other day, on reading a paper called
the County Chronicle which came hither in the package of some books from
London. It contain’d News from Hartfordshire, and inform’d me among
other things that at Great Berkhamstead, the place of my birth, there is hardly
a family left of all those with whom in my early days I was so familiar. The
Houses no doubt remain, but the inhabitants are only to be found now by
their Grave-stones, and it is certain that I might pass through a Town in which
I was once a sort of principal figure, unknowing and unknown.11
In the century following Cowper’s death, however, his status as a
‘principal figure’ in the town’s cultural history was re-established by a
succession of citizens and local historians. Percy Birtchnell, writing in
1960, noted that although Cowper’s name is now ‘seldom mentioned’ in
the town of his birth,
in Victorian times and the earlier years of the [twentieth] century, William
Cowper was the subject of many a public lecture, and schoolchildren were
left in no doubt that Berkhamsted had produced a very great poet whose
works deserved a place on every bookshelf. Members of learned societies
came here on literary pilgrimages …12
Victorian local historians in particular had shown themselves enthusiastic
champions of Cowper and the continuing relevance of his writing. The
Revd John Wolstenholme Cobb, Curate and subsequently Rector of St
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Peter’s (1871-83), devotes several pages to Cowper in his Two Lectures
on the History and Antiquities of Berkhamsted, describing him as
a man of whom we may all be proud – a man of whom it has been truly said
that if anyone was born a poet it was Cowper, the poet of Christianity. The
life, indeed, and writings of one who has been characterised by Hazlitt as the
most popular poet of his generation and the best of English letter-writers,
and as one whose poems contain a number of pictures of domestic comfort
and social refinement which can hardly be forgotten but with the language
itself.13
In that part of his book focused on a detailed history of St Peter’s
Church, Cobb suggests that one particular draw for literary pilgrims was
the memorial to the poet’s mother, ‘that monument which is perhaps of
greater interest than any other in the church’, and one suspects that the
emotional appeal of the memorial must owe something to the enduring
power of Cowper’s poem on her picture, as well as to the inherent pathos
of the memorial’s inscription, which Cobb reproduces:
‘Here also lyes interred the body of Ann Cowper […] late wife of John
Cowper, D.D., rector of the parish, who died Nov. 13, 1736. As also the
bodies of Spencer, John, Ann, Theodosia, Judith and Thomas, the children of
the said John and Ann Cowper, who all dyed infants, and Mrs Cowper died
in the thirty-fourth year of her age’.14
Cobb also mentions the memorial window in St Peter’s Church installed
by the renowned Victorian stained-glass company Clayton and Bell in
1872, noting that ‘The Rev. J. E. Greatheed, the son of one of Cowper’s
intimate friends, aided greatly in the selection of the subjects, which
are all chosen with reference to Cowper’s poems. On the topmost light
will be observed the spotless lamb, with the angelic choir around’.15 The
window depicts Christ the King flanked by the women and disciples
going to the empty tomb on the first Easter Day. The inscription at
Christ’s feet is taken from the Olney Hymn, ‘Jesus Hasting to Suffer’,
and reads ‘Salvation to the dying man, And to the rising God’. Cowper
is also depicted in the window, at a prayer desk with his pet hares.16
According to the church’s website, the Cowper stained glass is now in
the Lady Chapel and not accessible to the general public.
Aside from the church, there were few tangible links to Cowper
for nineteenth-century literary pilgrims or historians. Henry Nash’s
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Reminiscences of Berkhamsted in 1890 waxes nostalgic for the ‘rural
appearance of the town’ in Cowper’s day, noting how its crowded side
streets are now ‘teeming with human life’. He recalls that, in the previous
century, ‘at the corner of the Rectory lane’, there was a ‘large barn for
the storage of corn and where the duet of flails during the winter days
produced those rural sounds of country life which have fled before the
march of intellect, and no longer greet our ears’.17 However, he also
concedes that ‘at this time the science of drainage had not yet reached
us’, and that the town was awash with sewage and refuse, used by
enterprising pigs as ‘a cooling bath’.18
As Birtchnell laconically observes, if visitors in Nash’s time expected
to see Cowper’s birthplace they were disappointed. The ‘old rectory’
was pulled down by John Crofts, rector between 1810 and 1850, who
had a new rectory built, higher up the hill. It seems that the engraving
which graces Grimshawe’s 1849 edition of Cowper was made just in the
nick of time. Today, Crofts’ replacement rectory is no longer the home
of the rector. A smaller house has been built for the rector, which, in an
appealingly recursive move, now occupies the actual site of Cowper’s
birthplace.
Demolition of the ‘old rectory’ excited strong feelings among
townsfolk of the time. Henry Nash in 1890 still found the event shocking,
his lament recalling not only Jane Austen’s disdain for ‘improvement’
but also Cowper’s own elegy for the poplars ‘fell’d’ near Olney: ‘Under
the plea of improvement every stone of the old building has been swept
away, and the beautiful walnut trees, under whose shadows the poet
must often have reclined, have been pulled down and converted into
implements of war, a practice that his very soul abhorred’.19
But one object ‘on which the poet’s eye had rested’ still remained to
gladden the literary pilgrim’s eye in the late nineteenth century – the
well house by the side of the drive in the garden, containing the well,
which supplied the rectory from a spring. Nash praises Revd Cobb for
doing what he could to honour the name of Cowper, and reproduces the
poetic inscription on the commemorative marble slab which Cobb had
caused to adorn the old well house, composed by Cobb’s own friend
‘the late Rev. G. S. Cantley, a man whom Cowper would have hailed as
a brother poet’:
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The shy perennial fountain the ivy-tods among,
Just emblem of his modesty and pure undying song,
With daily crystal draught refreshed the poet’s fragile youth,
Amid the precious opening buds of genius, grace, and truth.
Ere spectral wrath had clouded in despair the noble mind,
Self loathing, yet so loving still, so boon to all mankind,
Oh, stranger, in your heart of hearts let tender reverence dwell,
And love of love revived to-day at gentle Cowper’s well.20
If Cowper’s visiting fans today expect to refresh themselves at ‘gentle
Cowper’s well’, they are doomed to disappointment. The well house,
together with its memorial slab, is gone too. All that now remains is
an anonymous metal grid at the side of Rectory Lane, which hides the
private water supply of the present house.
But, at least, the features of William Cowper remain on display in the
town today, thanks to the initiative of the Mechanics’ Institute, which
arranged in 1873 for a copy to be made of a portrait ascribed to John
Jackson, R.A. (but actually made after the famous portrait by Lawrence),
and hung in Berkhamsted Town Hall, where it is still visible.21 An article
in the Berkhamsted Chronicle in 2005 summarises further evolutions
in Cowper’s profile in the town of his birth, noting the existence of a
Cowper Road and a Gilpin Ride.22
Although the foregoing discussion has focused mostly on particular
buildings within the town, both Cobb and Nash are equally concerned to
attribute Cowper’s lifelong love of the countryside to the rural environs
of Berkhamsted. Nash in particular, who in the passage quoted above
regretted the nineteenth-century urbanisation he described, suggests that
‘the rural sights and sounds peculiar to country life met one at every
turn’ in the Berkhamsted of Cowper’s day, and that ‘doubtless our own
poet had Berkhamsted in mind when he penned the oft-quoted words –
“God made the country, but man made the town”’.23 Although Cowper
lived mostly away from his birthplace after his mother’s death, he
continued to visit his father throughout his time at Westminster and the
Inns of Court, and the quiet pastoral landscape seems to have refreshed
him in a manner that Wordsworth was later to describe more fully in
‘Tintern Abbey’. In The Task, Cowper recalls how he has ‘loved the
rural walk / O’er hills, through valleys, and by river’s brink, / E’er since
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a truant boy I pass’d my bounds / T’enjoy a ramble on the banks of
Thames’. It is tempting to compare this with the memories of another
distinguished Berkhamsted writer, Graham Greene, for whom truanting
on the Common and among the woods of Ashridge provided welcome
relief from the perceived pressures of the classroom, ‘for then I could
be alone in the solitude of the countryside, and at this period of my life
I loved the country. It was my natural escape route … I grew clever at
evasion. Truancy was impressed as the pattern of my life’.24
Both Nash and Cobb wax lyrical over the charms of Berkhamsted
Common, ‘one of our chiefest antiquities, and at the same time one of
our greatest present glories’, and Nash suggests it could be turned into
a convalescent resort.25 Both historians relate the local legend whereby
‘the celebrated naturalist’ Linnaeus ‘was once journeying across our
Common when the gorse was in full bloom, and the good man was
so impressed with the sight that he fell on his knees and thanked God
for the great beauty with which he had clothed the earth’, and cite a
poem on the subject ‘kindly written by Mr. Cantley [author of the poem
on Cowper’s well] for our parish magazine in 1874’.26 Intriguingly,
Linnaeus’s visit is dated by Cobb to 1736, when the small boy Cowper
was still in Berkhamsted.
If the Linnaeus anecdote offers a somewhat rare insight into the
spiritual sensibility of the great naturalist, a similar conjunction of
religious and natural devotion characterises what is the most recent
and impressive of Berkhamsted’s efforts to memorialise Cowper. In
2000, the town’s Cowper Society ‘commissioned a new engraved glass
window in the north wall of the nave’ to honour Cowper and to mark the
new Millennium (a conjunction which would likely have amazed him).27
Made of transparent etched glass by David Peace and Sally Scott, its
upper panel depicts the church surrounded by trees and wildlife while in
the lower panel panes, Cowper’s pet hares are seen frolicking, and there
are inscriptions from two further Olney Hymns, ‘Oh! for a closer walk
with God’ (‘Return, O holy Dove, return!’) and ‘The Light and Glory of
the World’ (‘Let everlasting thanks be Thine for such a bright display as
makes a world of darkness shine’).28
