Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage:

Grasmere pub turns home for England’s Poet Laureate

by Chandana DISSANAYAKE in Cumbria

It was then called the Dove and Olive. Locals and travellers who found that this beauty-spot among the lakes of England’s North West Cumbria sold excellent ale, frequented it in the 18th century. The pub was later closed, however, as better establishments came up elsewhere and it was in 1799 that poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy from Cockermouth decided to make a home of it; they remained there for eight and a half years.

Having visited the Dove Cottage I realised that the house not only drew the admirers of the poet’s immortal lines from the world over for sentimental reasons but also served as an index to the life and the times of a Victorian family, the name of which is synonymous with that of the Lake District.

The Wordsworths were perhaps the wealthiest family in the small town of Cockermouth, with their father serving as a Legal Representative of the first Earl of Lonsdale. Thus, it was not considered unusual that this son of Wordsworth House earned his BA from Cambridge University in 1791.

Following his now famous sojourns in revolutionary France, also Germany, and back in England, the poet and his sister discovered the abandoned pub and decided to convert it to a home, where the two could undertake literary pursuits undisturbed by the rest of the family. Later, however, the Cottage was to see the arrival of a bride (1802) and the birth of the poet’s children.

As one enters Dove Cottage, a drinking parlour with a large fireplace and oak panelling converted into a living room can be seen. Here, Dorothy (and subsequently Mary Hutchinson, the poets wife too) had attended to domestic chores while the poet himself tried to keep away from it all as far as he could, as its domesticity stood in the way of his quiet reflection! The roots of his poems had taken germination upstairs in a parlour overlooking the beauteous landscape where the visitor still finds a couch with a cushion that carries Dorothy’s decorative stitches, where he is supposed to have lain ‘in vacant or in pensive mood.’ It is said that the poet who was not very fond of pen and ink often made Dorothy and Mary write down what he dictated either from memory or brief notes and this has been proven right by the calligraphy of several manuscripts currently on display at the Wordsworth Museum adjacent to the Dove Cottage.

The parlour contains a cabinet that displays the poet’s spectacles, cups and spoons and his favourite ice-skates. In the passage next to the room is the grandfather clock, still very accurate, that the poet had bought at an auction for 37 ½ pence!

Next on display is the bedroom of William and Mary, with its bed and original bedding and an important document that still bears testimony to the poet’s worth in Victorian England-the Royal Warrant appointing him as Poet Laureate, forwarded to him by Her Majesty’s Gentleman Usher in Daily Waiting. At the death of his predecessor and friend Robert Southey, Wordsworth was granted the appointment in 1843 following several refusals by the poet who did not see himself as a monarchist.

It was only when Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel pointed out that he would not be required to render any marked services to Queen Victoria that Wordsworth agreed to accept office. He was paid 6o guineas annually during his tenure and the Queen gifted him with a barrel of wine at Christmas! The bedroom also displays Wordsworth’s ‘passport’, a large single sheet which ascribes to him a height of 5’ 9” and records several of his sojourns in France.

As one exits through the rear door, the simple yet lush garden and orchard, so lovingly tended by the brother and the sister meet the eye. Prominently seen in the centre are the stone steps leading from the garden to the orchard (see picture). A diary entry by Dorothy, dated February 8, 1802, states that William on that day had ‘added a step to the orchard steps’. These were completed with the help of his neighbour John Fisher. The orchard has a bower and a journal within for visitors to record their impressions on the poet’s home, to which I added mine.

The most popular poem composed during Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage days is perhaps I wandered lonely as a cloud or simply Daffodils. As visitors enter the Wordsworth Museum on the left of Dove Cottage, a glass cabinet displays Dorothy’s now famous entry in one of her Grasmere journals (see picture) that resulted in a work that made her brother’s memory eternal. Dorothy, who had been walking along the shore of Lake Ullswater, one of the largest of its kind in the Lake District, had at first come across ‘a few daffodils close to the waterside’ the spread of which later expanded to what was ‘about the breadth of a country turnpike road’. The entry is dated April 15, 1802. The poem was first published that year and a copy is displayed next to Dorothy’s journal.

When Wordsworth’s turn to mingle his dust ‘with rocks and stones and trees’ came in 1850, he was buried under a yew tree, one of eight that he had planted in the churchyard of St. Oswald’s, the Grasmere Parish Church, situated half a mile away from Dove Cottage.

His daughter Dora, whom he deeply loved, had been buried there three years earlier and later Dorothy and Mary too were laid to rest by his side (see picture). A memorial in his honour, built by his neighbours and friends, is seen still within the church precincts.

The writer wishes to thank Prof. Jane Taylor, Durham University and Wordsworth Trust for assistance.