WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Dove Cottage, Grasmere. Home of William Wordworth.

Dove Cottage, formerly an inn known as the ‘Dove and Olive’, is first recorded in a list of pubs of Westmoreland in 1617. It remained a pub until 1793, and the oak-panelled walls and slate floors still recall the drinking rooms of those years. In 1799 the poet William Wordsworth undertook a walking tour of the Lake District with his close friend, and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was on this tour that he first saw Dove Cottage, by now available as a house to rent, and, in late December 1799, he and his sister Dorothy moved in.

Dove Cottage was Wordsworth’s home until 1808; eight years of ‘… plain living, but high thinking’, during which Wordsworth produced what are now regarded as his finest works. It is through his sister Dorothy’s journals, kept at Dove Cottage, that the daily life of the poet and his family is illustrated so clearly.

The Wordsworths were succeeded by their young friend Thomas De Quincey, later famous for writing The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. From 1836 there was a varied succession of tenants until 1890, when a trust, formed by the Reverend Stopford Brooke (1832 – 1916), bought the cottage and opened it to the public a year later.

Psychicworld.net visited The Lake District in search of the source of William Wordsworth's poetic inspiration. The first location we visited was his former home in Grassmere, this is called Dove Cottage and is now open to the public. Above and below are two photographs of Dove Cottage.

The Entrance To Dove Cottage.

William Wordsworth wrote many poems that featured impressions of his beloved home in The Lake District of England. Psychicworld.net set out to capture the essence of this glorious area in photographs using the words of William Wordsworth to better illustrate the images.