by Lucy Stone   ‘It feels as if you’re, when you speak it, as if you’re dancing and swaying in the wind, as if the daffodils were’, one year ten pupil from Keswick School observed, when asked how she felt reading I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud for the sound project Re-Imagining the Wordsworths, a collaboration […]

by Gareth Evans Following six months of settled living with his sister Dorothy, one May morning William Wordsworth left Dove Cottage with his brother John to walk through Yorkshire.  Separated from her brothers in early childhood only to be permanently reunited as adults, an understandably emotional Dorothy found ways of coping with what was clearly […]

by Hannah Piercy   The 5th June 2017 was not so much ‘a fine showery morning’, as Dorothy Wordsworth says of the 5th June 1802 in her diaries, but one of those days when being outside for a few minutes can get you soaked to the bone – so a typical rainy day in the […]

by Jemima Short This sound project is the product of collaboration between the Wordsworth Trust and the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. A group of PhD Students, led by myself and Kate Sweeney of Newcastle University working alongside Lucy Stone (Newcastle University) and Hannah Piercy (Durham University), set out to create sound pieces that bring […]

by Fred Blick   Wordsworth’s contemplation of the primrose, as seen in ‘The Primrose of the Rock’ of 1831/5, illustrates the development of his spiritual beliefs concerning death and renewal. The poem reveals a change from a playing with the idea of continuity by Pythagorean transmigration of the soul to a conventional belief in orthodox, […]

Melissa Mitchell, Assistant Curator at the Wordsworth Trust, talks about a new digital exhibition at Grasmere William Wordsworth was a lucky man. In his sister Dorothy, his wife Mary, and his daughter Dora, he had an endless supply of encouragement and love. Together, they were homemakers, a support network – but perhaps more remarkably, they were […]

by Fred Blick The close relationship between Wordsworth’s 1804 ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ (commonly called ‘Daffodils’) and his 1802 ‘The Barberry-Tree’ has been largely overlooked. The principal reason for this is that the 113 lines of ‘The Barberry-Tree’ were not discovered until 1964 and the poem was only accepted as part of the […]

By Katherine Robson As a Collections Trainee at the Wordsworth Trust, my role involves answering public enquiries about our collection. Recently, I was sent some interesting questions from actress, Emma Pallant. To prepare for her role as Dorothy Wordsworth in an upcoming play about William Wordsworth, Emma wanted to know more about Dorothy’s character and […]