Dove Cottage
Encyclopedia
Grasmere
Grasmere is a village, and popular tourist destination, in the centre of the English Lake District. It takes its name from the adjacent lake, and is associated with the Lake Poets...
in the Lake District
Lake District
The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes and its mountains but also for its associations with the early 19th century poetry and writings of William Wordsworth...
. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close for all of their lives...
from December 1799 to May 1808, where they spent over eight years of "plain living, but high thinking". During this period, William wrote much of the poetry for which he is remembered today, including his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes . The poem was completed in two parts, with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood...
", "Ode to Duty
Ode to Duty
Ode to Duty is a poem written by William Wordsworth.-Description:“Ode to Duty” is an appeal to the principle of morality for guidance and support...
", "My Heart Leaps Up
My Heart Leaps Up
My Heart Leaps Up When I BeholdMy heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old,Or let me die!The Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to be...
" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is a poem by William Wordsworth.It was inspired by an April 15, 1802 event in which Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, came across a "long belt" of daffodils...
", together with parts of his autobiographical epic, The Prelude
The Prelude
The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it...
.
William Wordsworth married his wife Mary in 1802, and she and her sister joined the Wordsworths at Dove Cottage. The family quickly expanded, with the arrival of three children in four years, and the Wordsworths left Dove Cottage in 1808 to seek larger lodgings. The cottage was then occupied by Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson de Quincey was an English esssayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .-Child and student:...
for a number of years, before being let to a succession of tenants.
The cottage was acquired by the Wordsworth Trust
Wordsworth Trust
The Wordsworth Trust is a living memorial set up to celebrate the works of the poet William Wordsworth and his contemporaries. Wordsworth, conscious of the need for poetry to renew itself within a tradition speaks of writing for 'youthful poets' who 'will be my second self when I am gone.'An...
in 1890 and opened to the public in 1891. The house is a Grade 1 listed building, and remains largely unchanged from Wordsworth's day. It receives approximately 70,000 visitors a year.
Before Wordsworth
Dove Cottage was built in the early 17th century, beside the main road from AmblesideAmbleside
Ambleside is a town in Cumbria, in North West England.Historically within the county of Westmorland, it is situated at the head of Windermere, England's largest lake...
to the south to Keswick
Keswick, Cumbria
Keswick is a market town and civil parish within the Borough of Allerdale in Cumbria, England. It had a population of 4,984, according to the 2001 census, and is situated just north of Derwent Water, and a short distance from Bassenthwaite Lake, both in the Lake District National Park...
to the north. It was probably purpose-built as a public house
Public house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...
, and it is first recorded as the "Dove and Olive", an inn
INN
InterNetNews is a Usenet news server package, originally released by Rich Salz in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992 USENIX conference in San Antonio, Texas...
included in a list of public houses in Westmoreland
Westmorland
Westmorland is an area of North West England and one of the 39 historic counties of England. It formed an administrative county from 1889 to 1974, after which the entirety of the county was absorbed into the new county of Cumbria.-Early history:...
in 1617. It remained a public house, sometimes called the "Dove and Olive Branch", until it closed in 1793. The history of the cottage is referred to in William's 1806 poem, "The Waggoner", in which the protagonist passes by "Where once the Dove and Olive-bough offered a greeting of good ale to all who entered Grasmere Vale".
The building is constructed from local stone, with limewashed walls and a slate
Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. The result is a foliated rock in which the foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering...
roof. There are four rooms downstairs, and another four upstairs. The ground floor rooms retain the oak panels and slate floors often found in well-built Lakeland houses of the period, and appropriate to their original function as drinking rooms in a public house. The fireplaces were altered in the 1790s to burn coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
rather than the traditional Lakeland peat
Peat
Peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation matter or histosol. Peat forms in wetland bogs, moors, muskegs, pocosins, mires, and peat swamp forests. Peat is harvested as an important source of fuel in certain parts of the world...
.
Wordsworth
William Wordsworth had been born in CockermouthCockermouth
-History:The Romans created a fort at Derventio, now the adjoining village of Papcastle, to protect the river crossing, which had become located on a major route for troops heading towards Hadrian's Wall....
in Cumberland
Cumberland
Cumberland is a historic county of North West England, on the border with Scotland, from the 12th century until 1974. It formed an administrative county from 1889 to 1974 and now forms part of Cumbria....
in 1770, and knew the Lake District well from his childhood. He moved away to study at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
in 1787, and then travelled in Britain and Europe for 12 years.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
in 1799. William had been close to his sister Dorothy in their childhood, but they had spent many years apart. Although they had lived together in Somerset in 1797 and in Germany in 1798, William wanted to find a permanent home for them together. Dove Cottage was empty and available for rent, and they took up residence on 20 December that year, paying £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
5 a year to John Benson of Grasmere.
On the ground floor, the main reception room was the "houseplace" or "kitchen
Kitchen
A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation.In the West, a modern residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a...
-parlour
Parlour
Parlour , from the French word parloir, from parler , denotes an "audience chamber". In parts of the United Kingdom and the United States, parlours are common names for certain types of food service houses, restaurants or special service areas, such as tattoo parlors...
", by the main door, which contains a cooking range and window seat
Window seat
A window seat is a miniature sofa without a back, intended to fill the recess of a window. In the latter part of the 18th century, when tall narrow sash windows were almost universal, the window seat was in high favor, and was no doubt in keeping with the formalism of Georgian interiors. It...
, used for the main daily meal. A smaller room next to the houseplace was used by the Wordsworths as Dorothy's bedroom. A separate kitchen was used for the more arduous task of the domestic routine, with the fourth room being a small buttery
Buttery
Buttery may refer to:* Buttery , a savoury Scottish bread roll* Buttery , a storeroom for liquor*Buttery A service room in a large medieval household.* Buttery, a cafe that sells food and drinksPeople named Buttery:...
, used as a larder
Larder
A larder is a cool area for storing food prior to use.Larders were commonplace in houses before the widespread use of the refrigerator.Essential qualities of a larder are that it should be:*as cool as possible*close to food preparation areas...
. The Wordsworths employed a neighbour, Molly Fisher, as a maid
Maid
A maidservant or in current usage housemaid or maid is a female employed in domestic service.-Description:Once part of an elaborate hierarchy in great houses, today a single maid may be the only domestic worker that upper and even middle-income households can afford, as was historically the case...
to do their washing and cooking.
Upstairs, the room over the houseplace was William's study, with views over meadows to the lake, used by William for his composition and as a second parlour for light meals and entertaining. The three other rooms were used as bedrooms, with the small room over the buttery being used later as a nursery for William and Mary's children. The walls of the small bedroom were covered with newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
s in 1800 as an attempt at insulation (later removed, but copies were put back in the 1970s). There was no running water
Running Water
Running Water may be:* Running Water, Tennessee, former name of Whiteside, Tennessee* Running Water, South Dakota, a community in Bon Homme County, South Dakota* "Running Water" from the 1983 album The Present...
inside the house, and the toilet was also outside in the garden. William and Dorothy took particular pleasure in the garden and orchard behind the house, their "little nook of mountain-ground", which was deliberately arranged in an informal "wild" state.
William became a key member of a group of Romantic poets
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
in the Lake District, later known as the Lake Poets
Lake Poets
The Lake Poets are a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review...
. Robert Southey
Robert Southey
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843...
lived in Greta Hall in nearby Keswick
Keswick, Cumbria
Keswick is a market town and civil parish within the Borough of Allerdale in Cumbria, England. It had a population of 4,984, according to the 2001 census, and is situated just north of Derwent Water, and a short distance from Bassenthwaite Lake, both in the Lake District National Park...
. Southey and Coleridge were married to sisters, Sarah and Edith Fricker, and Coleridge himself moved his family to Keswick in 1800. Both Coleridge and Southey became a frequent visitors to Dove Cottage, but Coleridge's marriage was unhappy, and he departed Keswick in 1804. Nevertheless, he returned to visit the Wordsworths in Grasmere from time to time. The Wordsworths were also visited at Dove Cottage by Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
, Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet FRS MRIA was a British chemist and inventor. He is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine...
, and Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
Mary Lamb
Mary Ann Lamb , was an English writer, the sister and collaborator of Charles Lamb.-Biography:She was born on 3 December 1764. In 1796, Mary, who had suffered a breakdown from the strain of caring for her family, killed her mother with a kitchen knife, and from then on had to be kept under constant...
. In later years, Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson de Quincey was an English esssayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .-Child and student:...
became a long-term guest.
William Wordworth's financial position had been strained since his father's death in 1783, but it improved somewhat in 1802 when the debts owed to his father by the 1st Earl of Lonsdale were finally paid with interest on the latter's death. As a result, William was able to marry Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, later that year. The cottage became their first marital home, still shared with William's sister Dorothy and now also with Mary's sister Sara. William and Mary's first three children were born in the cottage, John (1803), Dora (1804) and Thomas (1806).
Dorothy kept a remarkable journal during the family's years at Dove Cottage. The journal was published in 1897 as The Grasmere Journal, providing intimate details of the family's daily life and of their visitors. Wordsworth often took poetic inspiration from his sister Dorothy's journal. An entry in her journal from 1802, remarking upon daffodils near Ullswater
Ullswater
Ullswater is the second largest lake in the English Lake District, being approximately nine miles long and 0.75 miles wide with a maximum depth of slightly more than ....
, was the inspiration for his poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is a poem by William Wordsworth.It was inspired by an April 15, 1802 event in which Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, came across a "long belt" of daffodils...
" in 1804.
Dove Cottage did not provide enough space for the Wordsworths' growing family and many visitors, and they left Dove Cottage for Allan Bank in Grasmere in May 1808. William had condemned this house as an eyesore when it was first built, and they moved on again in 1810 to the Old Rectory in the centre of Grasmere. Finally, in 1813, they moved to much the larger and better appointed Rydal Mount
Rydal Mount
Rydal Mount is a house near Ambleside in the Lake District. It is best known as the home of the poet William Wordsworth from 1813 to his death in 1850....
, a few miles to the south just outside Ambleside
Ambleside
Ambleside is a town in Cumbria, in North West England.Historically within the county of Westmorland, it is situated at the head of Windermere, England's largest lake...
. The Wordsworths continued to rent this property for 46 years, until Mary's death in 1859, William having died 9 years earlier. Rydal Mount was acquired in 1969 by Mary Henderson (née Wordsworth), William's great great granddaughter. It remains in the ownership of the Wordsworth family, and has been opened to the public since 1970.
After Wordsworth
Thomas de QuinceyThomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson de Quincey was an English esssayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .-Child and student:...
, a friend of the Wordsworths, took up residence in Dove Cottage in 1809, the year after the Wordsworths left. He had often stayed with the Wordsworths since 1807, and held William Wordsworth in high regards. De Quincey married the daughter of a local farmer, and remained in residence until 1820. His Confessions of an English Opium Eater was based on his experiences as an opium
Opium
Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...
addict, and describes him relaxing at the cottage with a quart
Quart
The quart is a unit of volume equal to a quarter of a gallon, two pints, or four cups. Since gallons of various sizes have historically been in use, quarts of various sizes have also existed; see gallon for further discussion. Three of these kinds of quarts remain in current use, all approximately...
of laudanum
Laudanum
Laudanum , also known as Tincture of Opium, is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight ....
. He upset the Wordsworth family by making alterations to Dove Cottage and more importantly, its garden. The increasing size of his family forced him to move to Fox Ghyll, but he continued to rent Dove Cottage, and store books there, until 1835. Debts eventually forced him to leave the cottage for good.
Dove Cottage then had a succession of tenants, becoming known as Dixon's Lodging. In the late 1880s, the cottage was bought by Edmund Lee, a businessman from London, for his son, an aspiring poet. Unfortunately, the younger Lee was not inspired to greatness by Wordsworth's old house. The Wordsworth Trust
Wordsworth Trust
The Wordsworth Trust is a living memorial set up to celebrate the works of the poet William Wordsworth and his contemporaries. Wordsworth, conscious of the need for poetry to renew itself within a tradition speaks of writing for 'youthful poets' who 'will be my second self when I am gone.'An...
bought the cottage for £650 in 1890. The Trust was formed by the Reverend Stopford Brooke with the express purpose of preserving this place, which was so closely bound with Wordsworth's works. The cottage became commonly known as "Dove Cottage" only after it was acquired by the Trust.
Recent times
The Wordsworth Trust has kept the cottage open to the public since July 1891. The cottage remains largely unchanged from Wordsworth's day, and the Trust has restored the garden to the "wild" appearance preferred by the Wordsworths. As a tourist attractionTourist attraction
A tourist attraction is a place of interest where tourists visit, typically for its inherent or exhibited cultural value, historical significance, natural or built beauty, or amusement opportunities....
, Dove Cottage receives approximately 70,000 visitors a year.
Wordsworth Museum
The adjacent Wordsworth Museum, founded in 1943 and moved to a coach house nearby in 1981, exhibits manuscripts, landscapes and portraits. The Jerwood Centre, an award-winning new building to house the collections of the Wordsworth Trust, opened near Dove Cottage in 2005.External links
- The Wordsworth Trust
- Literary Guide to the Lake District, Grevel LindopGrevel LindopGrevel Lindop is an English poet, academic and literary critic.-Life:Lindop was born in Liverpool and studied at Wadham College, Oxford, where he read English. After two years of postgraduate research at Wadham and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford, he moved to Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, where he...
, 2005, ISBN 1-85058-821-X - History of Dove Cottage
- Grasmere — Dove Cottage / The Wordsworth Museum
- Just William, The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, 18 April 2005