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Literary Passion · Grasmere, Cumbria

Dove Cottage (the Wordsworths at Grasmere)

The tiny lakeland cottage of William, his adored sister Dorothy — whose journals record wearing his wedding ring the night before he married — and his bride Mary. The intensity of the brother-sister bond has fascinated and divided scholars ever since; the documented record is devotion, and this entry claims nothing more.

StatusDocumented history
Date1799–1808
The peopleWilliam Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Hutchinson
The siteDove Cottage, Town End, Grasmere (Wordsworth Trust)
Coordinates54.45528, -3.01667 (confidence 5/5)

The story

It is a small, dark former inn at Town End, Grasmere, and between 1799 and 1808 it held one of literature's strangest households. Here William Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy, whose Grasmere Journal records their life in prose so fine that both William and Coleridge quietly borrowed from it. Its most famous entry is for 4 October 1802, William's wedding day: Dorothy had worn his wedding ring all the night before; that morning he took it from her finger and slipped it back on with a blessing; and she then lay unable to move until she was told the couple were returning. Some readers, scholars included, have read an erotic intensity into the Wordsworth siblings' bond; others see an unusually fierce but chaste attachment in the emotional register of the age. The evidence is Dorothy's own words, and a passage of the journal that a later, unknown hand deliberately scored out. When the Wordsworths left, the tenancy passed to Thomas De Quincey. The cottage and the journal manuscripts are cared for by Wordsworth Grasmere.

More stories at this spot

The eyes everyone remembered

Nobody who met the young Dorothy Wordsworth forgot her eyes. The radical John Thelwall called her "the maid of ardent eye"; William wrote of the "shooting lights" of her "wild eyes"; De Quincey called her the wildest, most ardent person he had ever known. By the end of a long life clouded by illness she had become a recluse — a transformation that biographers, reaching for the drama, have sometimes overstated. The wildness was real, and so was the tenderness.

Sara's Seat

On the fells above Grasmere the household built a stone seat and named it for Sara Hutchinson. It is the kind of ordinary domestic act — a place to rest on a walk — that the journals are full of. But the name carries a freight the walkers themselves might not have owned: the woman Coleridge could not have, memorialised in stone by the family she could not quite join, on a hillside they all crossed together, again and again.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Bohemian & LibertineDe Quincey's Opium Marriage at Dove CottageGrasmere / Rydal, Cumbria (Westmorland) · England

The Opium-Eater moved into Wordsworth's old cottage, got a farmer's daughter pregnant, married her — and the Wordsworths never forgave the 'beneath him' match.

Documented historyLiterary PassionWordsworth's Secret French DaughterGrasmere, Cumbria (Westmorland) · England

England's poet of daffodils fathered a daughter in revolutionary France in 1792 — then quietly buried the fact for a lifetime.

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Fact & fiction

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