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There is a moment when you step into Dove Cottage that surprises almost everyone. The house is smaller than you expected. The rooms are lower-ceilinged, darker, more cramped than a building associated with one of the greatest poets in the English language has any right to be. And then you realise — that is precisely the point.
William Wordsworth moved into Dove Cottage in December 1799 with his sister Dorothy. He was twenty-nine. He had no income to speak of, a small annuity from a friend's estate, and the conviction that what he needed to write the poetry he felt was in him was this: the Lake District, Dorothy, and quiet. He stayed until 1808, when the growing family made the cottage too small. In those nine years, in rooms you can stand in today, he wrote the Prelude, the Immortality Ode, and hundreds of the poems that established English Romanticism.
Dove Cottage was originally a pub — the Dove and Olive Bough — serving travellers on the road between Ambleside and Keswick. Wordsworth rented it from 1799 and the name Dove Cottage came later, after his tenancy. It is a vernacular Lakeland building: whitewashed rubble walls, slate roof, small windows set into thick walls to keep the cold out. The interior is tiny by modern standards — the main living room perhaps four metres by four, the kitchen smaller, the bedrooms above reached by a steep stair.
The house is now managed by the Wordsworth Trust and is open to visitors most of the year. The rooms are preserved as closely as possible to their appearance during Wordsworth's tenancy, with original or period-appropriate furniture, Dorothy's journals behind glass, and Wordsworth's writing implements laid out on the table as though he has just stepped outside.
Dorothy Wordsworth's journals from the Dove Cottage years are among the most important documents in English literary history — not because Dorothy was unimportant as a writer (she was extraordinarily good), but because they provide a day-by-day record of the household that produced some of the finest English poetry.
Her entry for 15 April 1802 describes a walk with William along the shore of Ullswater: We saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. William's poem — I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud — was written two years later, using Dorothy's observation almost directly. The flower that turned into the most famous daffodil in English literature was first noticed by his sister.
The cottage garden, steep and terraced on the hillside above the house, was Wordsworth's own work. He designed and planted it, writing in a letter that gardening was his main occupation between poems. The mossy summerhouse at the top of the garden — where he often paced and composed aloud, to Dorothy's mild exasperation — is still there. The view from it down over the roof of the cottage to the valley below is the view he was looking at when he was working.
Immediately adjacent to the cottage, the Wordsworth Museum holds one of the finest literary collections in Britain — manuscripts, letters, portraits, notebooks and the artefacts of a writing life. The rotating exhibitions draw on a collection that includes Wordsworth's own annotated copies of his poems, letters to Coleridge, and the small leather-bound notebook in which Dorothy kept her journals.
Dove Cottage entry is included in both our Wordsworth tours. Your expert storyteller will explain what you are looking at before you go in — the household, the writing process, the relationship with Dorothy, the Coleridge connection — so that the rooms, when you reach them, mean something specific rather than something general.
The difference between visiting Dove Cottage with context and visiting it without is the difference between reading a poem and understanding it.
Dove Cottage is a key stop on both the Wordsworth Morning Tour and Wordsworth Afternoon Tour. Entry included in the tour price. Maximum seven guests.