The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals

"The Grasmere Journal, written by Dorothy between 1800 and 1803, covers the most formative and important years in the Lake District, after William and Dorothy settled in a small house (now known as Dove Cottage) by the side of Grasmere lake. They were cohabiting, companionably and very happily, in the period leading up to William’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson. The journal records many details of their domestic life together – the walks they took, the natural sights and sounds they noticed – as well as Dorothy’s involvement in William’s poetry. Her writing feeds into his, and his writing feeds into hers. The journal celebrates the creative process that they’re sharing. If you want to look at the Grasmere Journal as a narrative, it offers the story of Dorothy’s adjustment to the fact that William is about to get married. But the journal is about the social life around them too. It charts their meetings with beggars, with discharged soldiers, with a leech gatherer – the many homeless people who during the Napoleonic war were trekking the roads in England, passing Dove Cottage and occasionally stopping to pick up a bit of bread or money. So we see Dorothy the social critic as well, observing the appalling effects of war and the economic devastation it entails. They are very interesting sentences, and of course they have provoked a great deal of speculation. The journal entry in which they appear records a highly significant moment, just hours before William’s marriage to Mary. Looking back on the events of that morning, and writing several weeks after they occurred, Dorothy recalls: “William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring – with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently.” The sentences have been crossed out – probably by William or Dorothy. We don’t know the reason, but we can speculate. The journal was readily accessible to Mary, especially after she moved in to Dove Cottage in 1802. Maybe one or other of the siblings felt that Dorothy’s highly emotional recollection might give Mary pain, by implying that Dorothy had prior and higher claims on William’s affections? (It’s not a subsequent editor who thinks “incest!” and scrubs it out. The ink wouldn’t go with that, it’s contemporary.) Personally, I think the astonishing ritual with the ring was William’s way of reassuring Dorothy that she would go on being the centre of the household – that she would never be ‘replaced’. (It was much more normal in those days for a sister to have a central role in the marital household.) But of course there’s all sorts of things you could read into this extraordinary moment. If you wanted, it could be grist for the mill in the incest interpretation. The Alfoxden Journal was written in 1798, while Dorothy and William were living at Alfoxden in Somerset, a few miles away from Coleridge. Unfortunately, the manuscript hasn’t survived. All we have is a heavily edited transcript, which is not at all like the Grasmere Journal because the person who made it – a scholar called William Knight – took out all of what you or I would think is interesting, all the domestic details which would give us an insight into how the Wordsworths were living their daily lives. Instead, Knight’s transcript gives us the descriptive passages relating to William. The loss of the original is mysterious and tragic — but by putting what survives of the Alfoxden Journal alongside the Grasmere Journal, we can see some of the ways in which Dorothy’s writing developed between 1798 and 1800."