ABSTRACT

Christopher Wordsworth (1774–1846) was William’s younger brother by four years. Christopher became ordained, was domestic chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury and later the Dean of Booking. Christopher Wordsworth’s Memoirs of Wordsworth remained unpublished until after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, although they were complete when Christopher died four years earlier. Christopher Wordsworth had described Wordsworth’s friendship with Coleridge rather formally: ‘The occasional intercourse which the two poets enjoyed at Racedown made them desirous of nearer intimacy’. Such an official version sounds quaint now that we have access to Coleridge’s vacillating notebooks and grovelling letters of thanks. However, like other family-biographers, Christopher allows more personal glimpses of his subject to enter the book through the reports of less implicated witnesses. His criticisms when they come sound as well-judged as his brother’s prose.