Tag: William Wordsworth

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Newlyn — Vital Stream (2019)

Newlyn, Lucy. Vital Stream. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2019.

Abstract: “A work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 – a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings had eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his former lover Annette Vallon, who had borne him a daughter he had never met. During 1802 the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Their journey to see Annette Vallon and meet William’s daughter for the first time took them through London to Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, involving a careful dissociation from his past. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence.”

With a Foreword by Richard Holmes.

Paperback. Published in association with the Wordsworth Trust.

Copy: Library of Congress.

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Moorman — Wordsworth: Later Years (1965)

Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: The Later Years 1803–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

“This book is the second part of William Wordsworth, A Biography, of which the first part was published in 1957. As the present volume begins at the end of 1803, before the completion both of the Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood and of The Prelude, its earlier chapters are concerned with Wordsworth still at the height of his poetic power. But in tracing the figure of Wordsworth through middle life into old age I have never felt that he became a less vividly inspired poet than in his earlier years” (“Preface,” p. vii).

See index for very extensive references to Dorothy Wordsworth.

Review: F. W. Bateson, New York Review, 19 December 1966.

Digital version: Internet Archive.
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Bainbridge — Mountaineering and British Romanticism (2020)

Bainbridge, Simon. Mountaineering and British Romanticism: The Literary Cultures of Climbing, 1770–1836. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Abstract: “This book examines the relationship between Romantic-period writing and the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ in 1802. It argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognised, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity’s evolution. It explores how the desire for physical ascent shaped Romantic-period literary culture and investigates how the figure of the mountaineer became crucial to creative identities and literary outputs. Illustrated with 25 images from the period, the book shows how mountaineering in Britain had its origins in scientific research, antiquarian travel, and the search for the picturesque and the sublime. It considers how writers engaged with mountaineering’s power dynamics and investigates issues including the politics of the summit view (what Wordsworth terms ‘visual sovereignty’), the relationships between different types of ‘mountaineers’, and the role of women in the developing cultures of ascent. ¶ Placing the work of canonical writers alongside a wide range of other types of mountaineering literature, this book reassesses key Romantic-period terms and ideas, such as vision, insight, elevation, revelation, transcendence, and the sublime. It opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between Romantic-period writers and the world that they experienced through their feet and hands, as well as their eyes, as they moved through the challenging landscapes of the British mountains.”

Contents: Introduction — 1. ‘The traveller of taste . . . the naturalist, and the antiquary’: The Evolution of Romantic-period Mountaineering in Britain — 2. ‘Curiosity’, ‘Dangerous Adventure’, and ‘the Perilous Point of Honour’: Three Case Studies in the Invention of Mountaineering — 3. From ‘Vast Extended Prospect’ to ‘The Spectacle of Nature’: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Aesthetics of Elevated Viewing — 4. ‘Master[s] of the Prospect’?: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Revelations of Elevation — 5. Romanticism on the Rocks: Feeling and Fear in the Mountains — 6. ‘Fearless I rove, exploring, free’: The Mountaineer and the Romantic Imagination — 7. ‘Active Climber[s] of the Hills’: Women and Mountaineering — 8. ‘I was a bauld craigsman’: Walter Scott’s Rock-Climbing Heroes — Conclusion: John Keats on Everest.

Reviews: Kerri Andrews, The Wordsworth Journal 52.4 (Fall, 2021); John Bugg, Studies in Romanticism 62.1 (Spring, 2023): 159–61.

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Butler — William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1997)

Butler, James A. “William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘Emma,’ and a German Translation in the Alfoxden Notebook.” Studies in Romanticism 36.2 (Summer, 1997): 157–71.

“The Alfoxden Notebook, now at the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere, is one of the central documents of the English Romantic Movement, for in that Notebook, William Wordsworth, early in 1798, developed his conceptions of the union and harmony of all things, of the mind’s creative interplay with the natural world. Of the many passages scholars have pored over in the Alfoxden Notebook, one text, though it has received scant attention, sheds light on William and his sister Dorothy in their crisis year of 1802. Within the Notebook appears (in a German script which makes it difficult to identify the writer by penmanship) a translation of William’s ‘The Two April Mornings,’ headed ‘Die zwey Aprilmorgens.’ But careful examination of this hitherto-unpublished translation shows Dorothy Wordsworth to have written the work early in 1802, shortly after William and Mary Hutchinson decided to wed. Dorothy’s selection of this poem to translate not only illuminates her emotional state in 1802 but also the complex interrelationships of works mentioning ‘Emma’ (William’s name for Dorothy in his poetry) written in 1798, 1800, and 1802” (p. 157).
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Cavendish — Death of Dorothy Wordsworth (2005)

Cavendish, Richard. “Death of Dorothy Wordsworth: January 25th, 1855.” History Today 55.1 (January 2005): 55.

“Dorothy Wordsworth lies buried in one of the most beautiful churchyards in England, at Grasmere in the Lake District, with her brother William, his wife Mary, and other members of the family. She is remembered for her delightful diaries, which were not published until years after her death.”

Available on the Web.
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Batho — Later Wordsworth (1933)

Batho, Edith C. The Later Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; New York: Macmillan, 1933.

Reprinted: New York: Russell & Russell, 1963.

Digital  version (1963): Internet Archive.

“This study . . . is . . . an attempt to discover from the available evidence—Wordsworth’s own poems, prose-writings, letters, and the reports of those who came into immediate contact with him—what were his real opinions in the latter half of his life: how far they were in agreement with or in contradiction to those of the earlier half: the impression which he made upon his contemporaries: and his attitude towards them” (pp. vii–viii).

For references to Dorothy Wordsworth, see index.

Reviews: H. J. C. Grierson, Modern Language Review 29.2 (1934): 199–208; Edith J. Morley, Review of English Studies 10 (April 1938): 238–242.

Copy: Library of Congress.
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Baron — Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Writing (1995)

Baron, Michael. Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Writing. London and New York: Longman, 1995.

Abstract: “The word ‘community’ occurs fairly seldom in Wordsworth’s poetry, and when it does it usually suggests ‘communion’ among all humankind, rather than a socially defined group of individuals. The community presented in the poems, which the reader is invited to join, is one which shares a language, and it is the community which gives validity to the language. In ‘Emma’s Dell’ the narrator trusts that his imagined community will include other kinds of people ‘shepherds’, not individuated but classed by an economic relation to place bridging a gap between aesthetic and economic inhabitation; and that the community will persist. Wordsworth approaches the idea that meaning is essentially a social phenomenon, that only shared associations give language its strength and veracity. For Wordsworth the primary aim of poetry is communication, and any meditation on subject matter and style inevitably involves imagining a reader. Wordsworth draws strength from communion with Dorothy but also from a sense of public recognition.”

Review: William Galperin, Studies in Romanticism 36:3 (Fall, 1997): 492–94.
 
Copy: Library of Congress.