Wordsworth’s Lap Rug
In the first of her new series on objects from knitting’s history, Penelope Hemingway discovers the story behind a blanket knitted for the poet laureate William Wordsworth
“‘My stockings there I often knit, ‘My ’kerchief there I hem;
‘And there upon the ground I sit - ‘I sit and sing to them…’” WE ARE SEVEN, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1798
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
(1770-1850) was the most prominent of Britain’s
Lake Poets, who were known for their romantic, simple, direct poems about the natural world. This knitted quilt, in naturally dyed colours, was an apt gift for a man who believed, according to his sister, Dorothy, in “plain living and high thinking”.
Wordsworth’s lap rug is no longer on display at Dove Cottage, his former Lake District home and now a museum, because it needs protection from sunlight. So I went along to the archives at The Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere to document it for The Knitter. I was also lucky enough to see other items, including a handwritten recipe for a different quilt, written by Wordsworth’s daughter, Dora, and another family member’s book of knitting recipes, complete with lace samples.
The lap rug was knitted for the elderly Wordsworth at some point during the last three years of his life. It now belongs to the Wordsworth Trust and was the gift of Dorothy Dickson, some time pre-1938. Dorothy was a great-granddaughter of the poet, and the quilt is now thought to have been knitted by her grandmother, Fanny Wordsworth.
Middle class pursuits
For many years, this lap rug was believed to have been made by Wordsworth’s beloved daughter, Dora. Dora had fragile health and predeceased her father in 1847. The lap rug is now attributed to the poet’s daughter-in-law Fanny Wordsworth, nee Graham, who was living in Carlisle, Cumbria, at the time she knitted it.
Fanny Graham was born in London in 1821, and although she seems to have lived her formative years down South, she had a Cumbrian father. She married the poet William Wordsworth’s son
- also called William - in Brighton, in January 1847. William Jr. had been helped into employment by his Poet Laureate father, who passed on to him his ‘day job’, as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland. Fanny lived in comfort and like many women of her class, will have had the leisure time to knit. In the early years of their marriage, William and Fanny lived on Castle Street, Carlisle.
Fanny was the daughter of Reginald Graham, who can be found on the 1851 census, widowed and living in some style at a grand address in Brighton. It’s likely Fanny became interested in knitting, like many upper-middle-class young women, at the height of the boom in knitting manuals of the 1830s-40s. Knitting was seen as desirable, as it was thought to display a lady’s hands in a way that made her irresistible to any men in the vicinity. Etiquette manuals suggest a woman’s hands were seen as a vital part of “impression management”.
Wanting to appear attractive to a wealthy man, William Thackeray’s literary heroine Becky Sharp, in the novel Vanity Fair, contrived to knit a silk purse in front of him; drawing attention to her hands. Women were idealised in literature as domestic “angels” and often depicted as knitting, tatting or crocheting. Becky, a lowly governess, asks the unattractive, wealthy Jos Sedley, to help her skein her yarn:
“..before he had time to ask how,
Mr. Joseph Sedley, of the East India Company’s service, was actually seated tete-a-tete with a young lady... his arms stretched out before him in an imploring attitude; and his hands bound in a web of green silk, which she was unwinding…” ! VANITY FAIR, 1848 "
Knitting was fashionable at the time the lap rug was made. As Wordsworth died only three years after Fanny married William Jr., she must have knitted the rug between 1847 and 1850.
Patchwork design
The lap rug consists of 100 garter stitch rectangles, knitted with a border of three stitches in various shades of dark brown or olive, and 18 garter stitches of various earth-toned colours. Fanny knitted ten long strips, each edged with the narrow border of brown or dark olive yarn, and then sewed them together. It was displayed folded in half in Dove Cottage for many years, so appeared half its actual size to the casual onlooker.
I was lucky enough to see the rug’s underside - rarely seen or photographed previously. This shows much more vivid colours as, having been carefully folded, it had been protected from sunlight.
The simple design on each rectangle was embroidered on using duplicate stitch, and all the 7cm x 8cm rectangles are 19 stitches by 36 rows. The olive/ brown edgings are three stitches wide and knitted on the 10 long strips, with a border either side on each end strip. The whole blanket was edged with a fringe.
The rug was knitted in commercially spun yarn which looks to approximate to a DK weight. Knitting manuals mention “nine-thread fleecy” or “eight-thread fleecy” as a yarn for blankets.
For many years, there was a romantic rumour that not only was it made by Dora Wordsworth, but that she gathered wool scraps from the hedgerows to make it. This is clearly not the case, as even a cursory examination betrays the fact it was made from commercially spun yarn, possibly Berlin wool; close to a modern tapestry yarn and certainly not the coarser, upland wool you’d expect in the Lake District. We know Dora did knit quilts, as there is a pattern for one in her handwriting at the Wordsworth Trust (sadly, Dora’s recipe is not this pattern!).
This rug may or may not have been made from a commercial pattern. Mrs Lambert’s My Knitting Book of 1847 describes a baby blanket with a similar structure, made on 4mm needles which would give a similar-gauge fabric.
Colours include a rich, deep ruby red, scarlet, pink, old rose, black, dark brown, saddle brown, tan and fawn, bottle green, sap green, navy blue, duck egg blue, mauve, white, beige and cream. Synthetic dyes weren’t invented until the late 1850s; Wordsworth died in 1850. These colours are therefore skilful, professionally applied natural dyes; reds will have come from madder, cochineal or kermes (or a combination); pinks from cochineal; green from overdyeing woad with weld, or dyer’s greenweed; mauve from logwood; blue from woad or indigo; browns possibly from walnut. Logwood was an expensive import, and the mauve is indeed the most unusual background colour in the blanket. Bark dyes were commercially manufactured in the West Riding of Yorkshire, near Huddersfield. The long edging strips are not consistent and vary from deep, olive green to shades of dark brown, suggesting the knitter may have been using up whatever scraps came to hand.
A knitted comfort
Wordsworth never really recovered from the death, in 1847, of his daughter, Dora. She fell ill whilst visiting her brother William in Carlisle, helping him set up the home he was about to share with Fanny. Knowing this, it gives some context to the lap rug - Fanny must have been offering comfort to the elderly, grieving poet, handknitting him such a homely and practical thing.
A thoughtful gift to an admired father-in-law, its colours are steeped in nature and its very presence allowing Wordsworth maybe to sit in his garden at Rydal Mount, in the shadow of the hills he once strode through.