Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author

The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.

La terapia de lo sublime en los diarios de Dorothy Wordsworth y Francisca Larrea

Si otrora un buen número de textos diarísticos fueron ignorados por la crítica al adolecer de veracidad y rigor, en la actualidad la ficción prevalece como principal elemento de continuidad en el que se apoya la literatura para crear obras maestras. Conocedoras de los nuevos gustos estéticos europeos, y en respuesta a lo sublime masculino, las escritoras Dorothy Wordsworth y Francisca Ruiz de Larrea defienden un compromiso de la mujer con la naturaleza alternativo al que plantea Burke. Se trataría del paisaje sublime no como un lugar al que escapar y en el que perderse, sino más bien un lugar en el que reaparecer y empoderarse, puesto que resulta transformador y terapéutico. Frente al mito romántico del genio solitario, Wordsworth y Larrea no solo rechazan la concepción burkeana de lo sublime, sino que encuentran en dicho paisaje remansos de paz y libertad.

Etching of Grasmere from Town End, 1814

William Green was relatively innovatory in choosing to depict Grasmere from Town End; most artists preferred a more elevated viewpoint. This is particularly useful because it is exactly the place from which William and Dorothy Wordsworth would have seen Grasmere, nestled under Helm Crag.

‘Active climber[s] of the hills’

As ‘active climber[s] of the hills’ to use Dorothy Wordsworth’s phrase, women played a significant part in the Romantic-period development of mountaineering and its literature, with Wordsworth herself and Ann Radcliffe producing two of the era’s most influential ascent narratives. This chapter examines the climbing activities and writing of the era’s female mountaineers, including Elizabeth Smith, Sarah Murray, and Ellen Weeton, in addition to Wordsworth and Radcliffe. It argues that these women were responding to a developing culture of climbing which increasingly sought to differentiate modes of ascent in terms of gender. The chapter concludes with a focused examination of Dorothy Wordsworth as both a mountaineer and a climbing writer, tracing her remarkable development over the course of three decades during which she wrote her narrative of her pioneering ascent of Scafell Pike, which was published unattributed in her brother’s Guide to the Lakes.

Introduction

This ‘Introduction’ establishes the importance of the activity Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ for the literature of the Romantic period. It discusses the etymologies of the words ‘mountaineering’ and ‘mountaineer’, showing how they indicated the creation of a new activity and identity. The chapter outlines the mountaineering pursuits and writings of a number of the period’s authors, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, John Keats, and Ellen Weeton, exploring the emerging link between ascent and literary authority. The introduction situates the overall study in terms of current research in the fields of mountaineering and Romantic-era literature.

‘Inhabited Solitudes’

Resisting a standard reading of William Gilpin as ‘appropriating’ Scottish landscape from a privileged metropolitan perspective, I discover a more radical and environmentally sensitive potential in Gilpin’s texts on the picturesque, developed in the writings of John Stoddart, and empowering for women tourists like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. As the literary masterpiece of all the texts studied here, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour in Scotland made a decisive break with the Pennantian tour as a ‘knowledge genre’ by developing a gendered version of her brother’s poetics of ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. Her gift for natural description is linked to the picturesque tradition, and briefly compared with Coleridge’s extraordinary Highland Tour notebooks. Read in tandem with her less ambitious second Highland tour of 1822, Recollections also presents a lively and sympathetic account of a plebeian Gaelic world in a moment of historical crisis.