Coleridge was nonetheless genuinely enthralled by the Lakes and his notebooks are scattered with comments like ‘O, God, what a scene!’, which might not be very original but was heart-felt. He noticed one day some lady tourists deep in their copy of Gilpin—one of the earliest travel books on the Lakes, which Wordsworth and most educated people had read: ‘Ladies reading Gilpin while passing by the very places instead of looking at the places.…’
As well as introducing Coleridge to the sights of Lakeland, Wordsworth also fitted in visits to some of their old friends. They went to see the Clarksons at Ullswater, where they’d recently built a house. Thomas Clarkson was a leader of the anti-slavery movement, while his young wife Catherine became one of Dorothy’s closest correspondents.
‘I must tell you that we had a visit from Coleridge and W. Wordsworth who spent a whole day with us,’ wrote Mrs Clarkson in a letter to Priscilla Lloyd, sister of Charles Lloyd, Coleridge’s friend. ‘C. was in high Spirits and talk’d a great deal. W. was more reserved but there was neither hauteur nor moroseness in his Reserve. He was a fine commanding figure and looks as if he was born to be a great prince or a great general. He seems very fond of C. laughing at all his jokes and taking all opportunities of showing him off and to crown all, he has the manners of a gentleman.’
Wordsworth was delighted by Coleridge’s genuine enthusiasm for the whole Lake District and it reinforced his own desire to live in the Lakes. ‘Coleridge enchanted with Grasmere and Rydal,’ William explained in a letter to Dorothy. ‘You will think my plan a mad one, but I have thought of building a house there by the Lakeside. John [their sailor brother] would give me £40 to buy the ground and for £250 I am sure I could build one as good as we can wish. We shall talk of this.… I have much to say to you.’
They never did build a house for themselves, but instead they took the little cottage in Grasmere which they had seen some time earlier; a modest little dwelling (available at a rent of only £8 a year, a third the rent of Alfoxden) which the world now knows as Dove Cottage.
William and Dorothy never knew it as Dove Cottage. It didn’t have a name. Their address was simply Town End, Grasmere, the name for a little group of cottages on the road outside the village itself, at the end of the town. Much earlier, their cottage had been a pub, the ‘Dove and Olive Branch’, which is where its later name came from. It must have been a good spot for a pub, being on the main route from Ambleside, part of the last group of cottages which the traveller heading for Keswick would pass before he starts hitting the high land over Dunmail Raise. The Wordsworths were for ever getting beggars and old soldiers and pedlars calling at their door, hoping for a crust or a few pennies, and they were usually lucky.
It was their first unfurnished premises—Racedown and Alfoxden were furnished—so Dorothy, determined to make it into her home, had good fun buying furniture and materials at Kendal. ‘We were young and healthy and had obtained an object long desired, we had returned to our native mountains, there to live; so we cared not for any annoyances that a little exertion on our parts would not speedily remove.’
The cottage was basically three up and three down, plus a buttery downstairs and a little box-room upstairs. Dorothy’s bedroom was downstairs, next to the front parlour-kitchen, a panelled room which you entered straight from the front door. William slept upstairs, next door to their sitting-room, used for entertaining, which had been chosen as such because it had the best fire. ‘The chimney draws perfectly,’ wrote William, ‘and does not smoke at the first lighting of the fire.’ Keeping warm and draught-free was the biggest bugbear of every Lakeland house—and still is—and as the cottage’s heat came from the fire, it meant that if by chance you were stuck with a bad fire, which didn’t draw or smoked, you might as well leave home. Dorothy lined the little box-room with newspapers, as it didn’t have a fire or a proper ceiling, hoping that would help to keep it warm. She did most of the decorating and made most of the furnishings herself, sewing and cleaning all day long, and was scarcely out of doors during the first few weeks. ‘One evening I tempted her out,’ wrote William, ‘but I had reason to repent of having seduced her from her work as she returned with raging tooth ache.’
Dorothy loved the house, and wrote ecstatic letters to her old Halifax friend Jane, now Mrs Marshall. ‘The only objection we have to our house is that it is rather too near the road and from its smallness and the manner in which it is built, noises pass from one part of the house to the other.’ However, they planted roses and honeysuckle against the cottage walls and enclosed the few yards of open ground at the front, roping it in as their front garden and separating themselves a bit more from the road. Their greatest success was their back garden. Even today, you can imagine what an exciting challenge it must have been. Basically, it is little more than the bottom of a hill, a steep slope which goes straight up from the back door. It contained a few old trees, which they grandly referred to as the orchard, and at the top Dorothy could see in her mind’s eye a little summer-house where they would sit of a summer’s evening. Together, they eventually built a little hut, made of moss, and planted the whole back garden, despite the slope, with wild mountain flowers, ferns and plants. From the hut, they got perfect views over the roof of their cottage, right across Grasmere to the lake and the surrounding fells, such as Silver Howe.
William’s main contribution in the first few weeks was to go and buy himself some ice skates, determined to relive his boyhood fantasies. They’d moved in during the last few days of December 1799, and their two adjacent little lakes—Grasmere and Rydal—were both frozen. ‘Rydal is covered with ice, clear as polished steel, and tomorrow I mean to give my body to the wind.’ They also had the use of a boat on Grasmere, which, when the ice melted, made possible other outings, such as fishing, which William loved, or picnicking on the little island in the middle of the lake.
Although William didn’t do much inside the house, where Dorothy was in charge of all cooking, baking, sewing, washing and ironing, he was quite useful outside, digging the garden, planting runner-beans, cleaning the well, fetching and cutting firewood. Together, with their domestic duties done, they went for walks round the two little lakes opposite, up the slopes of Nab Scar behind them, or through the village of Grasmere and up the secret valley of Easedale, past the waterfalls and up to the tarn. It was a huge delight when they discovered Easedale, which remained for ever a favourite walk. Morning and evening they would go on such two- and three-hour jaunts as part of their daily routine, but they also did longer walks, over the mountain slopes of Helvellyn to Keswick, to Ullswater to see friends, or just to look for a particular sheep fold, because William wanted to describe one in a poem. Their meals were simple, porridge being the most regular item, plus boiled mutton now and again or home-made pies. As Dorothy often remarked, their life was ‘plain living and high thinking.’
Their neighbours were friendly: local craftsmen and small-time statesmen, few of them educated or middle-class, except for one, a retired clergyman. ‘We are very comfortably situated with respect to neighbours of the lower classes,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘They are excellent people, friendly in performing all offices of kindness and humanity and attentive to us without servility—if we were sick they could wait upon us night and day.’
They don’t seem to have had any of the Alfoxden problems; nobody wondered whether they really were brother and sister or whether they were secret, radical agitators. The locals far exceeded William’s expectations; he pronounced them ‘little adulterated’. Being unsophisticated, they took Dorothy and William at face-value and welcomed them, noting their thrifty habits and their outdoor activities. No doubt the Wordsworths soon made it known that they were in fact natives of Cumberland, despite their wanderings in the south, which must have helped their acceptance. They took on a daily woman, Molly Fisher, partly inheriting her, and keeping her on out of charity as she was a bit simple and not much good in the house, but they became devoted to her, and she to them.
Many of the local families still did home weaving and spinning (these were the last of the cottage-industry days, before it all moved south to the Lancashire factories), and in the evenings, coming back from their twilight walks, they would see their neighbours’ daughters, sitting at their spinning-wheels by candlelight. There wasn’t much affluence, as the Industrial Revolution was having a bad effect on the little farmers, taking away their labourers and their side-lines, like weaving; but most of the neighbours still managed to employ a servant or two, as the Wordsworths did with their Molly. Domestic servants rarely earned above £2 a year, or up to £5 for a man, so they were cheap to hire, though they had to be fed. All the local families, servants included, ate round one communal oak table, a table so big that the carpenter had usually built it inside the room. All the men wore clogs and homespun coats for their everyday life, farmers and servants alike. They’d gather in the evening round the peat or log fires—coals, if they could afford it and if the carrier had got through—with their mobcaps on. Even if your fire didn’t smoke, you could still get covered with soot and smutty drops. Local ale, usually home-brewed, was drunk with most meals, including breakfast. Though William drank water rather than ale, he would take a glass if he was out visiting and the host pressed it upon him. The front room, the parlour which you entered from the front door, was the focal point in all these Lakeland farmhouses, where the fire was kept on, night and day. The Wordsworths were a bit different in allocating an upstairs room as an extra sitting-room, making it more a withdrawing room in the Southern style. But then, in the early days at Dove Cottage there were often just the two of them, before the visitors and others arrived and so they could apportion the rooms as they liked.
They had visitors almost from the beginning, their first being their brother John who came in January and stayed till September, though he went off elsewhere on occasional visits. He had joined William and Coleridge on part of their Lakeland tour the previous autumn—Coleridge had been very impressed by him. ‘Your brother John is one of you; a man who hath solitary musings of his own intellect, deep in feeling, with a subtle tact, a swift instinct of truth and beauty, he interests me much.’ He was the quiet, introverted one of the family, with Dorothy’s sensitivities though without her effervescence and liveliness, and so it’s surprising, in a way, that he should have taken up such a tough and brutal life as a sailor’s. These were the days of press-gangs, lashings and ill treatment, though the officers were naturally of a more gentlemanly breed than hitherto. John was now approaching twenty-eight and had proved a great success in his chosen career, having climbed from fifth mate up to first mate. He was about to take up the captaincy of the Earl of Abergavenny, an East Indian ship which had had family connections. Their cousin, another Captain Wordsworth, had previously been the master.
Despite his naval success, John’s ambition was to make as much money as quickly as he could by investing in his cargoes, as was the custom of the time, and then to retire to Grasmere. He’d already done well, having saved enough money for William to contemplate borrowing £40 from him for the plot for his proposed house, but he wanted to have sufficient to build his own house, near to theirs. Most of all, he wanted to be able to give money to William to help him devote himself to poetry. With his new and important position, he looked well set to achieve these ambitions.
Mary Hutchinson and then her sister Sarah came next, while John was still there, and stayed for several weeks. John was very close to both of them. William himself was friendly with both sisters, and although he and John went in turn to visit them at their farm in Yorkshire, William at least had ‘no thoughts of marrying’.
Charles Lloyd and his wife became their neighbours, not completely welcome ones, moving into a house near Ambleside not long after the Wordsworths had arrived in Grasmere. He was the wealthy young friend and pupil of Coleridge whom they’d first met in the West Country. (He was a member of the Lloyds banking family.) Lloyd had rather fallen out with Coleridge after he’d published a novel, dedicated to Lamb, in which Coleridge felt he’d been ridiculed. Lloyd, Lamb and Southey felt Coleridge had started it all by parodying their poetic style in some sonnets. Lloyd was something of a lame duck, suffering from epilepsy and mental depressions, but he and the Wordsworths kept up a regular if lukewarm connection for many years, visiting each other’s homes for tea and literary conversations. There weren’t after all many literary people in their immediate neighbourhood in the early days. They had a further connection when the youngest Wordsworth brother Christopher—who had done brilliantly at Cambridge, where he’d become a Fellow and was now ordained—became engaged to Lloyd’s sister Priscilla.
‘We have not any society except the Wordsworths,’ wrote Lloyd to a friend in January 1801. ‘They are very unusual characters—indeed Miss Wordsworth I much like—but her Brother is not a man after my own heart—I always feel depressed in his society.’
The most important visitor, the number one friend in their life, was of course Coleridge. He had returned to his family in the West Country but came in April to visit them at Dove Cottage and decided then to live in the Lakes. Dorothy found him a house to let at Keswick, Greta Hall; he brought his pregnant wife and son Hartley up from Somerset and they moved in.
Greta Hall was, and is, a large, handsome mansion on high ground, overlooking Derwentwater. The Coleridges rented only half of it, the rest being occupied by its owner, a wealthy carrier; but the accommodation was vastly superior to their little Somerset cottage—an old hovel, as Coleridge had described it. The positions were now reversed, with the Wordsworths living in a humble cottage and Coleridge having the smarter address. Not that it mattered, since Coleridge was hardly ever there. He was constantly walking the thirteen miles from Keswick to Grasmere—a long and steep walk at the best of times, even without taking in Helvellyn on the way, as he sometimes did. He’d come to Dove Cottage for tea, or arrive late at night when they were all in bed, and stay for weeks. He’d bring some poem or other piece of writing, and Dorothy would get up and make some porridge while William put on his dressing-gown and listened, then in turn read his own latest pieces of poetry.
During these early years at Dove Cottage, they often lived and moved liked one close-knit little club, with their own jokes and references. They had their own names for special places, such as Sarah’s seat or John’s grove. On one rock, on the road across to Keswick, which all of them frequently used, they carved their initials: WW, MH, DW, STC, JW, SH. They stood for William Wordsworth, Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Wordsworth and Sarah Hutchinson. (The rock was dynamited during road-widening, and only fragments survive, but a painting of it hangs in Dove Cottage today.) This shows the strong friendship between the Wordsworths, Hutchinsons and Coleridge—three ladies and three men, a perfect little unit—but notice that Mrs Coleridge is missing. She didn’t go in for all this nocturnal wandering, these romantic musings, poetry readings under the trees, by the lakeside or behind rocks. It’s hard to be sure how the sixsome paired off, if they ever did—Dorothy was very fond of Coleridge, who was especially fond of Sarah Hutchinson, who in turn was very fond of John Wordsworth. They were really all in love with each other, and all in love with themselves. As in the West Country, they were living an early version of a drop-out life: young people who refused to take up the conventional middle-class occupations, moving around, staying in cheap rented premises, living off the land and off their wits (and off pieces of writing when they could manage it), getting hand-outs from their friends or relations, endlessly discussing and arguing about their philosophical or political views. There was also the overtone of drugs—at least, with Coleridge, who had started off using opium for illness, but now increasingly took it to make himself feel better when he was generally depressed.
William and Coleridge had been living this sort of embryo hippy life for the previous ten years, since they’d left Cambridge, but in William’s case it was beginning to seem a little unreal. Coleridge was
still full of plans for further moves, new settlements and re-groupings in Europe or the West Indies, but William’s life at Dove Cottage was becoming much more regular than it had been in the West Country. He had rushed his first two publications through to earn money for a specific purpose and had then turned to other activities, but now he was writing all the time. He’d become a professional poet. From the first months at Dove Cottage, he decided to be more wary of spongers and his rule became: ‘If you like to have a cup of tea with us, you are very welcome; but if you want any meat, you must pay for your board.’
Coleridge wasn’t exactly a sponger, though he was very keen on people sharing according to their means. (When he and Southey had shared lodgings in Bristol, he had paid only a third of the rent, on the grounds that Southey was earning twice as much as he was.)
Coleridge’s health, however, was becoming a serious problem, and he would often spend weeks ill in bed in Dove Cottage, with Dorothy having to nurse him, fearing for his life. One of his complaints seems to have been rheumatism, the causes of which he traced back to his childhood. He once spent the night alone in some damp fields, having had a row with his brother and run away. He still took silly risks with his health, like swimming rivers and then keeping on his wet clothes, or deliberately spending nights on misty hillsides. He also suffered from gout and neuritis. When his health was good, which it certainly was for long spells, he did the most amazing walks and mountain climbs all round the Lakes single-handed. He was in effect the first of the modern fell walkers, the first known outsider to set out to climb the mountain tops, just for the pleasure of doing so. His ascent in 1802 of Scafell Pike, the highest Lakeland peak, is the first recorded climb of that magnificent mountain. He took pen and ink up Scafell, and wrote in his notebook and composed a letter to Sarah Hutchinson, and then rushed madly down again, avoiding the easy ways.
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