Studying in the Round

The Rotunda from the outside.

The Rotunda from the inside. Wordsworth looks contemplative perched on the shelf.

Wordsworth's table.

The Village Hall where Chris has played badminton a few times.

Sunset over Grasmere

This week I’ve been trying to focus on finishing up my book.  The things I find distracting me are the incredible views out my living room window that keep me sitting on the couch longer than I would normally and the wealth of material at the Library.  I’m finding it easy to get off track when looking at the manuscripts.  It’s not really off track since I think much of what I am looking at will form the basis for later work, but I really must focus!

Beccy introduced me to a highly useful tool this week.  It’s called Romanticism: Life, Literature, and Landscape.  It’s a database composed primarily of digital images of manuscripts from the Wordsworth Trust collection.  Those working at larger institutions may have subscriptions to this database, but it was my first introduction to it.  A few of the manuscripts I wanted to view are currently unavailable as they are in the museum, but this database allowed me to look at them anyway.  The advantage of the database is full access to Dorothy’s Journals and the family letters.  Another advantage is the ability to zoom in on a particular word or phrase to help decipher it.  Such a database also helps to preserve the original document from too much wear and tear.  One loses some element of immediacy looking at a digital image, but the impact is largely the same, and certainly the information is the same.  One can still see a level of emotion not available to one in printed form.  And of course, should I really need to see a document (that is not in the museum), I can still ask for it.

During my research, I had one of those aha moments that every researcher loves, one that makes one sit back and say, I have to think about this some more.  This week, it was a letter from Wordsworth written to Thomas Hutton asking that Thomas Wilkinson be appointed a trustee to his brother Richard’s estate.  The praise Wordsworth gave of Wilkinson suddenly put the relationship these two men had into perspective.  It’s a relationship I’m very interested in as I see Wilkinson as not perhaps your average reader of Wordsworth but a reader representative of a certain type of audience that received Wordsworth’s poetry well.  I also found a remarkable letter by Wilkinson to Wordsworth responding to a few poems Wordsworth apparently sent Wilkinson.  I am looking forward to more time with these letters.

On Thursday, Beccy apologized for having to move me to the Rotunda to study while the new interns received a lecture on the Romantic period.  It’s great fun to watch the interns begin to make this place their own.  Chris said a few of them even showed up at the weekly badminton gathering at the village hall on Thursday night.  At any rate, Beccy didn’t need to apologize.  I rather like the Rotunda.  It’s much smaller than the regular Reading Room, and there’s something cozy about this round room lined with books.  The room was a little cluttered right now with some paintings lying on the table and propped up around the room.  But imagine my delight when I saw a sketch by Benjamin Robert Haydon of Wordsworth leaning against one of the bookcases.  This is the original sketch for the chalk drawing that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.  It’s a lovely, soft drawing—a very sympathetic rendering of the poet, I think, and one that makes one want to sit down and have tea with him.

As I was leaving the Rotunda, Beccy said, “Well at least you can say you’ve sat at Wordsworth’s table.”  “What!” I said astonished.  She lifted the green cloth covering the table I’d been sitting at to reveal a dark wood, round table. “This was Wordsworth’s,” she said.  Is there no end to the surprises here?  I suddenly felt very odd about the fact I’d been using my computer all morning.  Where was my rag paper and quill?