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DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (1771-1855)

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Originally appearing in Volume V28, Page 826 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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DOROTHY

WORDSWORTH (1771-1855)  ,
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English writer and diarist, was the third child and only daughter of John Wordsworth of
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Cockermouth and his wife, Anne Cookson-Crackanthorpe . The poet William Wordsworth was her
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brother and a
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year her senior . On the
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death of her
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father in 1783, Dorothy found a home at
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Penrith, in the house of her maternal grandfather, and afterwards for a time with a maiden lady at Halifax . In 1787, on the death of the elder William Cookson, she was adopted by her
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uncle, and lived in his Norfolk parish of Forncett . She and her brother William, who dedicated to his
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sister the Evening Walk of 1792, were early
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drawn to one another, and .in 1794 they visited the Lakes together . They determined that it would be best to combine their small capitals, and that Dorothy should keep house for the poet . From this time forth her
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life ran on lines closely parallel to those of her
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great brother, whose companion she continued to be till his death . It is thought that they made the acquaintance of Coleridge in 1797 . From the autumn of 1795 to
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July 1797 William and Dorothy Wordsworth took up their abode at Racedown, in Dorsetshire . At the latter date they moved to a large
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manor-house, Alfoxden, in the N. slope of the Quantock hills, in W . Somerset, S . T .

Cole-ridge about the same time settling near by in the
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town of Nether Stowey . On the loth of
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January 1798 Dorothy Wordsworth began her invaluable Journal, used by successive biographers of her brother, but first printed in its quasi-entirety by Professor W . Knight in 1897 . The Wordsworths, Coleridge, and Chester
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left England for Germany on the 14th of September 1798; and of this journey also Dorothy Wordsworth preserved an account, portions of which were published in 1897 . On the 14th of May 1800 she started another Journal at
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Grasmere, which she kept very fully until the 31st of December of the same year . She resumed it on the 1st of January 1802 for another twelve months, closing on the lrth of January 1803 . These were printed first in 1889 . She composed Recollections of a Tour in Scotland, in 1803, with her brother and Coleridge; this was first published in 1874 . Her next contribution to the
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family
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history was her Journal of a Mountain Ramble, in November 18os, an account of a walking tour in the Lake
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district with her brothel . In July 1820 the Wordsworths made a tour on the continent of
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Europe, of which Dorothy preserved a very careful record, portions of which were given to the
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world in 1884, the writer having refused to publish it in 1824 on the ground that her "
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object was not to make a
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book, but to leave to her niece a neatly-penned memorial of those few interesting months of our lives." Meanwhile, without her brother, but in the
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company of Joanna Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth had travelled over Scotland in 1822, and had composed a Journal of that tour . Other
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MSS. exist and have been examined carefully by the editors and biographers of the poets, but the records which we have mentioned and her letters form the
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principal
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literary relics of Dorothy Wordsworth . In 1829 she was attacked by very serious illness, and was never again in good
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health .

After 1836 she could not be considered to be in

possession of her
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mental faculties, and became a pathetic member of the interesting household at Grasmere . She outlived the poet, however, by several years, dying at Grasmere on the 25th of January 1855 . It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Dorothy Wordsworth's companionship to her illustrious brother . He has left numerous tributes to it, and to the sympathetic originality of her perceptions . " She," he said, " gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares, and delicate fears; A heart the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy." The value of the records preserved by Dorothy Wordsworth, especially in earlier years, is hardly to be over-estimated by those who
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desire to form an exact impression of the revival of English
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poetry . When Wordsworth and Coleridge refashioned imaginative literature at the close of the 18th century, they were daily and hourly accompanied by a feminine presence exquisitely attuned to sympathize with their efforts, and by an intelligence which was able and anxious to move in step with theirs . " S . T . C. and my beloved sister," William Wordsworth wrote in 1832, " are the two beings to whom my intellect is most indebted." In her pages we can put our
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finger on the very
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pulse of the machine; we are
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present while the New Poetry is evolved, and the sensitive descriptions in her
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prose lack nothing but the accomplishment of verse . Moreover, it is certain that the sharpness and fineness of Dorothy's observation, " the
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shooting lights of her wild eyes," actually afforded material to the poets . Coleridge, for instance, when he wrote his famous lines about " The one red leaf, the last of its clan," used almost the very words in which, on the 7th of March 1798, Dorothy Wordsworth had recorded• " One only leaf upon the top of a tree . . . danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind." It is not merely by the
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biographical value of her notes that Dorothy Wordsworth lives .

She claims an

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independent place in the history of English prose as one of the very earliest writers who noted, in language delicately chosen, and with no other object than to pre-serve their fugitive beauty, the little picturesque phenomena of homely country life . When we speak with very high praise of her
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art in this direction, it is only
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fair to add that it is called forth almost entirely by what she wrote between 1798 and 1803, for a decline similar to that which fell upon her brother's poetry early invaded her prose; and her later
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journals, like her Letters, are less interesting because less inspired . A Life by E . Lee was published in 1886; but it is only since 1897, when Professor Knight collected and edited her scattered MSS., that Dorothy Wordsworth has taken her independent place in literary history . (E .

End of Article: DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (1771-1855)
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