Wordsworth, William

(1770-1850) and Dorothy (1771-1855)

   Born in Cockermouth, Cumbria, William was the second son and Dorothy the only daughter of the five children of the lawyer and agent to Sir James Lowther (afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale). William was educated at the grammar school at Hawkshead, near Lake Windermere; Dorothy at a boarding school in Hipperholme, near Halifax, Yorkshire. William graduated B.A. from St. John's College, Cambridge University, in 1787, and apart from his time there and in France during the early stages of the Revolution, brother and sister were rarely separated. From 1794 Dorothy's life was devoted to helping William with his poetry and fostering his love of nature. The year 1795 saw the development of a close relationship between the Wordsworths and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see entry), and the trio spent the winter of 1798-1799 touring Germany, where William spent much of his time writing poetry, and Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated in producing Lyrical Ballads (1798). In 1799 brother and sister moved into Dove Cottage (now the Wordsworth Trust), in Grasmere, and with Coleridge and Robert Southey (see entry) living nearby, they formed the "Lake Poets." In 1802 William married Mary Hutchinson, who had been his schoolmate, and in 1813 he, Mary and their children, with Dorothy, finally settled at Rydal Mount, near Ambleside. From 1812 to 1842 William earned income from the job of distributor of stamps for the county of Westmoreland, which he handed on to his son William. Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate in 1843. He died a peaceful death and was buried in Grasmere churchyard. He is memorialized by a stone in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. In 1835 Dorothy succumbed to pre-senile dementia and for the last two decades of her life was confined to the house and terrace of Rydal Mount, in the care of her sister-in-law. In addition to her poems (the majority of which are untitled) Dorothy published many journals and letters. Some of William's poems: "A Wren's Nest," "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802," "The Solitary Reaper," "We Are Seven," "Written in Very Early Youth." Some of Dorothy's poems: "A Cottage in Grasmere Vale," "A Winter's Ramble in Grasmere Vale," "Floating Island at Hawkshead," "Loving and Liking," "Peaceful Our Valley, Fair and Green," "Thoughts on My Sick-bed."

   Sources: A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century. James H. Trott, ed. Cumberland House Publishing, 1999. Animal Poems. John Hollander, ed. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Biography of Dorothy Wordsworth (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dwordsw.htm). Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. Francis Turner Palgrave, ed. Oxford University Press, 1964, Sixth edition, updated by John Press, 1994. Poems by Dorothy Wordsworth (http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/236/dwordsworth2.html). Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Poetry by English Women: Elizabethan to Victorian, R.E. Pritchard, ed. Continuum, 1990. Romanticism. Duncan Wu, ed. Blackwell, 1994. The Best Loved Poems of the American People. Hazel Felleman, ed. Doubleday, 1936. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Major Works of William Wordsworth. Stephen Gill, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Guber, eds. W.W. Norton, 1985. The Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Iona Opie and Peter Opie, eds. Oxford University Press, 1973. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth. Hyman Eigerman, ed. Columbia University Press, 1940. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).