Ghosting Grasmere: the Musealisation of Dove Cottage

Abstract

In the summer of 1889, Stopford Augustus Brooke — Queen Victoria’s chaplain, dedicated Wordsworthian, critic and poet — went on holiday to Grasmere with his brother. Whilst there they made a visit to the cottage that William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had moved to 90 years earlier, in December 1799. This was the ‘Home at Grasmere’ of Wordsworth’s eponymous poem, the cottage Wordsworth called ‘our happy castle,’¹ and ‘a home within a home,’² where Dorothy wrote her Grasmere journal, and where William wrote or conceived much of his most highly considered work. It was the house in which Wordsworth’s three eldest children were born, after his marriage to Mary Hutchinson in 1802; the house they still called ‘our cottage’³ long after they had moved out and Thomas De Quincey had made it his. For Brooke, visiting in that late-nineteenth-century summer, it was already full of ghosts and echoes of the past. The Wordsworths’ lives there had been recorded as they were being lived, in Dorothy’s journal and in William’s poems. They had also been recalled and evoked for public consumption by Thomas De Quincey in his Reminiscences of the English Lakes and the Lake Poets, first published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1834 and 1840. It was the cottage of these writings that Brooke and his brother came to see, and it was the cottage of the writings that they found. Bought only a few months beforehand by a gentleman from Bradford ‘who had written a pleasant and graceful book on Dorothy Wordsworth’,⁴ the cottage appeared perfectly to fit its literary descriptions. To the Brooke brothers the cottage appeared unkempt, but authentically Wordsworthian. Brooke later writes: ‘It remains almost as it was left by Wordsworth when, in 1808, he went away from it to Allan Bank’ (12). During this visit, a plan formed in Brooke’s mind. The next summer the cottage opened its doors to the public, as Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Museum; and by 1893, visitors from as far away as Massachusetts, Montreal and Singapore were flocking to it, to pay their sixpence, see inside the former home of the famous poet, and sign their names in the visitors’ book.⁵