Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth by Dorothy Wordsworth

First published: 1874; 1889; 1897; 1904 (The Alfoxden Journal, 1798 et seq; Journal of Visit to Hamburg and of Journey from Hamburg to Goslar, 1798; The Grasmere Journal, 1800-1803; Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, 1803; Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater, 1805; Excursion up Scawfell Pike, 1818; Journal of a Tour on the Continent, 1820; Journal of My Second Tour in Scotland, 1822; Journal of a Tour in the Isle of Man, 1828

Critical Evaluation:

The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth offer surprising dividends to the reader who turns to them in search of information about the author’s famous brother William, for Miss Wordsworth was herself a remarkably sensitive and perceptive observer of man and nature, as well as a gifted prose writer. Her surviving works are of two kinds. She left daily notes about her life at Alfoxden and Grasmere, where she lived with her brother between 1798 and 1803, and about holiday excursions in the Lake Country, Germany, and on the Isle of Man. Working from notes taken on two other trips, she composed long accounts of her tour of Scotland with Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1803 and of her travels on the Continent with her brother, his wife, and several friends in 1820. These journals were written simply for the entertainment of friends, but Dorothy’s smooth narrative style and her gift for conveying local color make her pages worthy of comparison with Johnson’s and Boswell’s more famous accounts of their trip to the western isles of Scotland.

The journals of the years at Alfoxden and Grasmere inevitably have the greatest interest for the modern reader, for they reveal most clearly Dorothy’s own personality and her relationship to her poet brother during the years in which he produced many of his finest works. Her description of her life during this period gives a vivid impression of her as a modest, self-effacing woman who dedicated herself to caring for her family and friends. The dominant force in her life was her passionate affection for William; at times she speaks of him in terms more applicable to a lover than to a brother. She kept house for him until his marriage to Mary Hutchinson, and she remained a beloved member of their household, helping rear several nieces and nephews and caring for the many friends who paid extended visits, among them Thomas De Quincey, Sir Walter Scott, and William Hazlitt.

Dorothy had boundless faith in William Wordsworth’s genius, and she took upon herself the task of removing all the inconveniences, distractions, and practical matters that were obstacles in the way of his writing. She spent many evenings copying the poetry he had composed on his daily walks, and she indicates that she sometimes suggested improvements. Comments like these appear on almost every page of her journals: “William composing in the wood in the morning,” or, “William worked all the morning at the sheepfold, but in vain,” or, “William was afterwards only partly successful in composition.”

Her concern for William’s health and poetic powers was extended to his friend and colleague, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was an almost constant visitor at Alfoxden and Grasmere. Dorothy and William watched with great distress Coleridge’s increasing lassitude, his dependence on opium and alcohol, his despair over his uncongenial marriage that sapped his creativity. Among the saddest of Dorothy’s comments are her resigned statements about his work; more than once she notes, “Coleridge had done nothing for the Lyrical Ballads.”

Dorothy’s aid to William did not end with cooking and copying. She had a fine mind, kept alert by wide reading; she mentions at various times enjoying Henry Fielding’s AMELIA, Boswell’s work, Shakespeare, and the poetry of Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson. She shared her brother’s feeling for the natural world. Often, immediately following a prosaic account of a domestic errand, will come a description of a scene she and William enjoyed on an evening walk: “A deep stillness in the thickest part of the wood, undisturbed except by the occasional dropping of the snow from the holly boughs.” On another occasion she tells how they first observed the crescent moon, a silvery line, a thready bow, attended by Jupiter and Venus in their palest hues.

Dorothy shared in the early nineteenth century preoccupation with the picturesque; her evaluations of landscapes are reminiscent of the scene in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in which Henry Tilney instructs young Catherine Morland in the proper way to look at nature: “Catherine was so hopeful a scholar, that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.” Dorothy brands a view from the top of a Lake Country hillside “mildly interesting,” and commenting on a seascape she says that “had there been a vessel sailing upon it, a perfect image of delight.” Touring the Alps in 1820, she was constantly in search of the sublime or the majestic scene.

Typical, too, of the Romantic frame of mind was her love for the wilder aspects of nature; she disapproved thoroughly of the “improvements” made by eighteenth century landowners who took pride in their formal gardens. She wrote after a visit to an estate near Alfoxden: “Quaint waterfalls about which nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed—ruins, hermitages, etc., etc. In spite of all these things, the dell romantic and beautiful, though everywhere planted with unnaturalized trees. Happily we cannot shape the huge hills or carve out the valleys according to our fancy.”

The human scene was as fascinating to Dorothy Wordsworth as the natural world. Her travel journals are filled with accounts of the individuals she met and the places where she stayed; she leaves the reader with an indelible impression of the odors and dirt of more than one inn, and she gives unforgettable descriptions of characters like the small Scottish boy who took Wordsworth to the Falls of Clyde and hid himself like a statue in a niche in the cave there. She had a housewifely interest in family customs, furnishings, and food that make her observations valuable evidence about the lives of the Scottish highlanders.

Typical is her description of the house where she waited to take a ferry across Loch Lomond; there two young girls chattered in Erse as they tried to choose a dress to lend the rain-soaked traveler; two boys played on the floor; an old woman sang doleful Gaelic songs to a fretful baby, with “all our clothes to be dried, dinner prepared and set out for us four strangers, and a second cooking for the family.” The setting more than compensated for the poverty and confusion of the place; “the peep out of the open doorplace across the lake made some amends for the want of the long roof and elegant rafters of our boatman’s cottage, and all the while the waterfall, which we could not see, was roaring at the end of the hut, which seemed to serve as a sounding board for its noise.”

Dorothy’s notes on life on the Continent are equally vivid. From her window in Cologne she watched passengers leave a ferry boat: “Peasants, male and female, sheep, and calves—The women hurrying away, with their cargoes of fruit and vegetables, as if eager to be beforehand with the market. . . . Two young ladies trip forward, their dark hair basketed round the crown of the head, green bags on their arms—two gentlemen of their party—next a lady with smooth black hair stretched upward from the forehead and a skull cap at the top like a small dish. The gentry passengers seem to arrange themselves on one side, the peasants on the other:—how much more picturesque the peasants!”

Dorothy had her brother’s eye for the striking individual, the man or woman who stood apart from the rest of humanity by strength of character. Like William, she was drawn to the peddlers and beggars who passed by their home. She gives in the Grasmere Journal a brief sketch of the old leech gatherer immortalized in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence”: “When William and I returned from accompanying Jones, we met an old man almost double. He had on a coat, thrown over his shoulders, above his waistcoat and coat. Under this he carried a bundle, and had an apron on and a night-cap. His face was interesting. He had dark eyes and a long nose. John, who afterwards met him at Wytheburn, took him for a Jew. He was of Scotch parents, but had been born in the army. He had had a wife, and ‘a good woman, and it pleased God to bless us with ten children’. All these were dead but one, of whom he had not heard for many years, a sailor. His trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce, and he had not strength for it. He lives by begging, and was making his way to Carlisle, where he should buy a few godly books to sell.”

Miss Wordsworth made no pretense of being a literary light in her day; none of her writing was meant for publication, and this fact is, in itself, a part of its charm. The journals invite the reader to share in the author’s experiences and her feelings, to look at the scenes she found beautiful or sordid, to share in her fascination with all kinds of men and women, rich and poor, young and old. Dorothy Wordsworth will never rank as a major literary figure, but she is, in the pages of her diaries, a delightful companion.