The Family Abandons Its Plan to Move to London

The Family Abandons Its Plan to Move to London marks the collapse of a future Agnes and William Shakespeare had imagined together: a home in the city where the children could live with their father and the family would no longer be divided between London and Stratford. At first, the move seems only a matter of time. Judith’s recurring illness makes it increasingly untenable, and William eventually redirects the money he had saved for a London house into land outside Stratford.

The London future they imagine

In the room where Agnes has just given birth to twins, she and William still believe that she will soon join him in London with all three children. Agnes is already thinking about what to take. She tells Susanna that they will live in a great city, where she will see houses, ships, bears, and palaces. Susanna asks whether the newborns will come too; Agnes smiles as she says they will. The exchange makes the move feel close enough to explain to a child, not merely a distant possibility.

William, too, has furnished this hoped-for future in his mind. He has seen houses and is saving to buy one. He imagines carrying Susanna on his shoulders to see the river and the playhouse, and imagines the admiration of new friends at Agnes’s dark eyes, her fine gloved wrists, and the beauty of the children. The small domestic details matter as much as the city’s attractions: two cradles in the kitchen, Agnes at the hearth, a yard for keeping hens or rabbits, and Susanna examining the rabbits. He pictures a household of the five of them, perhaps more children in time, without relatives entering at inconvenient hours from the neighboring house.

That imagined home answers a present separation. William is living in a rented room in London, writing letters that take four days to reach his family. In the house he pictures, he would see them simply by raising his head; he would no longer feel alone in the city or divided between a life there and a family elsewhere. The move promises not only a new address but a shared daily life in which Agnes’s presence might help him put down roots.

Judith’s health delays the move

The plan begins to yield to the needs of the newborn daughter. Judith survives and grows into a child, but her health remains precarious. Convulsions make her arms and legs tremble and move involuntarily; she suffers fevers and chest congestion, irritated skin, and difficulty breathing. Illness that brings a cold to her siblings can bring her a high fever and chills; a little cough for them can become an attack in which she struggles for breath.

Agnes keeps postponing departure. First she waits for Judith to improve, then asks Eliza to write, and fixes new possible times: spring, the end of summer’s heat, the passing of autumn winds, or the melting of snow. Each postponement gives the move another imagined date while leaving its underlying obstacle unchanged. When Judith is two, Agnes stays awake through the nights, placing warm bowls of pine and clove between the bed curtains to help her breathe and to make the blue around her lips disappear. By then, the family can see that Judith is too fragile to survive a move to London. The projected household in the city has become incompatible with the practical demands of caring for her.

William changes the plan

The decision becomes explicit during an epidemic, when the playhouses close and William comes to visit. He has stopped selling gloves and advertising his father’s wares; he has left that business altogether and now works only in playhouses. One night he watches Agnes pace the kitchen carrying Judith, who is suffering from an upset stomach. The child looks at him over her mother’s shoulder, tears silently running down her cheeks as she clutches Agnes’s shirt in both hands. William watches her, clears his throat, and tells Agnes that he has decided how to spend the money he saved.

He will not use it to buy a house in London. Instead, he will purchase land on the outskirts of Stratford, which, he tells Agnes, will provide them with a good income. He rises as if squaring himself to the decision and to this revised provision for the future. The choice does not erase the work and hope invested in the London plan; it redirects the money toward a form of security compatible with the family’s circumstances.

A future redirected to Stratford

The narration makes clear that the move will never happen: Agnes will not take the children to live with their father in London, and William will never buy a house in the city. This foreknowledge sets the couple’s confident conversation after the twins’ birth against its eventual outcome. Their expectation that the family will soon be together in London persists even as the conditions that might have sustained it are changing.

The purchase of land outside Stratford is the concrete consequence of the abandoned plan. Rather than bring Agnes and the children into William’s London life, the savings are converted into an income-producing asset near their existing home. Judith’s illness is not simply an interruption after which the original arrangement resumes: its repeated demands determine which future the family can pursue. The scene of William watching Agnes carry their daughter gives that decision its human measure, while his squared posture makes the change a deliberate act of provision rather than an unspoken drift away from London.