Ode to Wordsworth
250 years after the poet’s birth, Frances Wilson visits his house, where he ate steak, admired daffodils and wrote his sublime works
‘What happy fortune were it here to live,’ Wordsworth wrote in Home at Grasmere. His home, a former inn called the Dove and Olive Bough, has recently had a happy fortune – £5.1 million, to be precise – spent on its refurbishment. The new Dove Cottage was meant to open on 7th April, Wordsworth’s 250th birthday. The virus means it’ll open later this year.
The purpose of the project, ‘Reimagining Wordsworth’, is less to prevent the whitewashed doll’s house from becoming another ruined cottage than to bring us closer to the ‘authentic’ Wordsworthian experience – with the help of a ‘learning space’ and a ‘viewing station’, neither of which sounds very Wordsworthian to me.
It seems strange, given that the object of the ‘reimagining’ is authenticity, that the Wordsworth Trust has not restored the original name of Town End, which is what the Wordsworths called their home. Dove Cottage was a later invention.
Town End was then the last house in Grasmere, a village described by Thomas Gray as ‘a perfect republic of shepherds and agriculturalists’. The cottage looked onto two other cottages, in one of which lived the Wordsworths’ servant Molly Fisher – who, Coleridge was stunned to discover, had never heard of the French Revolution.
But it has long been possible, without the aid of learning spaces and viewing stations, to reimagine life in Dove Cottage because Dorothy Wordsworth, who lived there with her brother, kept a journal.
Here she described in brief, lyrical entries their daily routine between Christmas 1799, when she and William moved in, and September 1802, when he brought his wife, Mary, to join them.
From The Grasmere Journals we learn that while William dug the garden, cleared the path to the privy and walked the three miles to Ambleside to get his tooth removed, Dorothy baked pies and mended clothes. One day, she made a shoe; on another day, she put in a
window. Beggars came to the door with stories that moved her to tears. Swallows nested above her window ledge. She and William took turns to have headaches and upset stomachs, and they sat up all night with Coleridge, drinking tea or watching the moon.
Sometimes Dorothy gardened in the moonlight and sometimes she and William simply wrote and read, a pleasure she recorded in real time: ‘The fire flutters; the watch ticks. I hear nothing save the breathing of my Beloved, as he now & then pushes his book forward, & turns over a leaf.’
Dorothy describes their lives as if they were a married couple, and this their first marital home. Another entry records that, after eating ‘Beefstakes’ for dinner, ‘we made a pillow of my shoulder; I read to him & my Beloved slept’.
Separated as children after the death of their mother, Dorothy and William were reunited as adults; no amount of interactive reconstruction can return to us the emotional intensity of these years.
Not only were they rediscovering each other, but William was discovering his vast poetic power and Dorothy was learning that her sensibility was essential to his genius. It was she who first recorded the daffodils by the lakeside, seen on one of her walks with William.
‘I never saw daffodils so beautiful; they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.’
That entry was written in 1802. Two years later, Wordsworth, leafing through her journals for inspiration, turned Dorothy’s description into a poem describing ‘a host of golden daffodils’.
In his version of the scene, he is wandering lonely as a cloud. In Dorothy’s version, they are vitally together, sharing each other’s ears and eyes. What we learn from The Grasmere Journals is that Wordsworth was never alone; nor was it possible to be so in a house this size.
What struck me about Dove Cottage as a child, when I came here regularly with my grandmother, who lived nearby, was how creepy it was. What magic the house had was created by the Wordsworths, who mythologised the place. Downstairs, the wainscoted walls looked black, the ceilings were low and beamed, the floors cold slate, and the parlour had only one tiny, diamond-paned window which looked onto the road.
Dorothy slept in a downstairs bedroom next to the kitchen, which had once been the bar of the inn. There were three more rooms upstairs, including Wordsworth’s study. But when he and Dorothy lived here together, before his children tore up and down the stairs, he wrote at the parlour table in his shirtsleeves with, Dorothy recorded, ‘his Basin of Broth before him untouched & a little plate of Bread & Butter’.
Wordsworth was, on this occasion, composing To a Butterfly. On this same table, with another basin of broth going to waste, he may have also put together the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, with the preface in which he set out the gospel of Romanticism: ‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’
The Wordsworths were bourgeois intellectuals living like hippies and their unconventional behaviour was the cause of gossip. They did whatever they wanted, whether it was reading Boswell in bed in the morning, going to sleep in the afternoon or lying on the hillside watching the clouds.
But most of all, they walked. Wordsworth was, as Seamus Heaney put it, a pedestrian poet. He composed in the open, pacing his lines into being. Dorothy describes the two of them walking ‘backwards and forwards’ in the orchard until dinnertime, with Wordsworth reciting his poetry.
Watching their eccentric neighbour walk was endlessly entertaining for the local farmers, one of whom described him ‘bumming and booing about’ as he marched up and down the road.
This bumming and booing was the composition of the finest poetry in the language, including the 1805 Prelude. While Wordsworth composed, our witness reported, ‘She, Miss Dorothy, kept close behind him, and she picked up the bits as he let ’em fall, and tak’ ’em down, and put ’em on paper for him.’
Thomas De Quincey described the poet’s walk as cade-like, ‘a cade’, he explained, ‘being some sort of insect which advances by an oblique motion’. We can therefore imagine Wordsworth edging Dorothy, holding onto her pencil and paper, off the path.
When the Wordsworths moved out of Dove Cottage in the spring of 1808, Thomas De Quincey took over the lease.
‘They who are dwellers in this holy place,’ Wordsworth wrote in Home at Grasmere, ‘must themselves be hallowed.’ De Quincey’s hallowed role was to be custodian of the Wordsworth shrine, but instead he turned the house into the opium den described in Confessions of an English Opium-eater.
The Wordsworths were furious – but not as much as they would have been had they foreseen that the site of their experiment in plain living and high thinking is now ‘a dynamic destination for creativity, inspiration and enjoyment’.
Dove Cottage, Grasmere, will open later this year