March Snow

Chris and Eifel head out the gate and towards Helm Crag.

Helm Crag just two days later.

Grasmere in the snow

The daffodils have arrived but maybe not as imagined!

Jeff Cowton introduces some visiting tour guides to the library's resources.

Everyone seems very happy to be here.

Well, there had to be one blog about the weather, didn’t there?  As you can see from the pictures, the weather this week has been changeable, to say the least.  We have our friend Eifel with us this week.  He’s here on his Easter break from St. Andrews University, and he came eager to climb the peaks.  But the snow on the tops has limited his hiking to the lower fells for the most part.  Earlier this week, he and Chris took a hike from here over to Hawkshead—a scouting trip for me to see if it would be a good hike for the Principia Lifelong Learning group coming to join me in late June.  About an hour after they left, it began to rain.  It rained steadily for hours, and I began to imagine them soaked and unhappy.  About 45 minutes before they arrived back, it stopped raining.  I saw them coming and ran to the door to help remove wet clothing.  They were completely dry.  It hadn’t rained at all over the ridge where they were.  They got about ten minutes of light hail, and that was it.  Now that’s localized weather!  The next day, the snow had cleared enough for them to hike to the top of Helm Crag.  Right now, I’m snuggled under a blanket in our house watching as the snow continues to fall.  It’s been snowing since yesterday.  It’s not snowing hard enough for huge amounts of accumulation, but the temperature isn’t going to get above freezing today, so it will be staying around until at least tomorrow.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s absolutely beautiful here in any weather.

The research has been going very well.  I’ve reached the point where the ideas are starting to come together, and I’m beginning to see a shape to things.  The highlight for me this week was getting to see two first edition copies of the Excursion in the library.  One had belonged to Lord Lowther and was from his library.  It was bound in leather with gild edging and an elaborate gilded seal on the front with a crown on the top of a wreath that encircled his name in scrolled letters.  The second copy was one from the Harrow Book Club.  It was bound simply in boards—a sort of cardboard cover that books were generally sold in unless the buyer wanted to pay for a leather or cloth binding.  On the front of the book was affixed a large bookplate that had printed on it the rules of the club and the instruction to erase one’s name when one had read a book.  The plate included the names of the twenty-one members of the club, nine of whom had read the book.  This copy helped answer some questions I had had about how book clubs operated as well as providing an example of how the Excursion was received in one group.

Also this week, a group of tour guides came to the library to hear from Jeff about all that the museum, Dove Cottage, and the library have to offer.  From the looks of it, they were impressed with the resources and were enjoying their time.  Today, the exhibit on Dorothy Wordsworth curated by Pamela Woof opens.  We are looking forward to seeing it.  It’s the first exhibit to focus solely on Dorothy.  As Pamela said to me in the library one day, “She’s coming into her own.”  About time.  If you are in the area, do stop by and see it.

Books, books, books

Very young students from the Grasmere Primary School came to the Trust for a tour.  These dolls helped to introduce them to Dorothy and William during story time in the library.  The Trust has an active education department with lots of opportunities for learners of all ages.

Back to the Quaker Library in London.

I keep trying to capture the amazing sunsets out our window.  Nothing is quite like being here!

This week took us back to London to the Quaker Library to once again look at Thomas Wilkinson’s papers, but this time, I was looking for a letter written to him that he quoted in a letter to Wordsworth regarding the Excursion.  And I found it!  Such successful treasure hunts are wonderful.  This one yielded some interesting questions about subscription libraries of the period that I will be exploring in weeks to come.  

I also went to London to attend a seminar conducted by the Dr. Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies.  These seminars, which happen monthly, cover a range of topics for anyone interested in learning more about non-conformist activities in England.  I had marked several on my calendar, and this one looked interesting: “Private Books for Educational Use—the Formation of the Northern Congregational College Library.”  I was especially interested by the time of the talk since I’d spent my day in the Quaker Library thinking about nineteenth century libraries.  While the talk wasn’t quite what I had expected, it was fascinating.  It announced a project to “make available in digital form the Catalogue of the Library of the Lancashire Independent College, Manchester (1885),” as the handout explained.  This project will add to the Dissenting AcademiesOnline: Virtual Library System by photographing (at this point) about 2500 books and entering them a searchable database.  The photographs try to capture any relevant images that indicate original provenance or marginalia. This portion of the site should go live in a month.  Ed Potten, from Cambridge University Library, spoke about questions that arise from examining these images, questions that might only be answered with the collection of more images from more books.  One of the potentially trivial but interesting questions was about the use of non-literary images drawn in the books—from early versions of the smiley face drawn into the letter “O” to brief astronomical sketches of the solar system.  Though rare, they are intriguing.  Have college students always scribbled in their books?

I have to say that I felt in the know when the discussion turned to habits of private collecting and sharing of books.  Not that I am by any means an expert, but my time at the Wordsworth Library has taught me some interesting things about how individuals used their libraries.  Wordsworth, for instance, leant out his books regularly and had a notebook to keep track of who had what book.  From the letters I’ve read in the library, too, it wasn’t just Wordsworth; people were constantly borrowing and loaning books to one another. According to David Allan (Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England), readers were forming book clubs and their own local subscription libraries.  “There may have been two thousand of the former by the 1820s and perhaps 260 of the latter,” he writes, “their participants ranging from luminaries like Wordsworth (at the Kendal Book Club), Coleridge (at the Bristol Library Society) and Austen (who joined a female-dominated book club at Chawton) to humbler figures like the apprentice cutler Hunter (who attended the Sheffield Book Society), the painter Christopher Thompson (who helped found an artisan’s library at Edwinstone in Nottinghamshire) and members of the Spitalfields silk-weaving community who established their own lending collection” (14-15).  

And marginalia, though not in every book in Wordsworth’s library, wasn’t an unusual occurrence.  A few weeks ago, a visiting scholar was looking at the marginalia in the family Bible.  Such scribbling can sometimes be quite revealing.

As always, it’s good to come home to Grasmere.  We arrived in rain, and it’s been raining all day again today, but we don’t mind.  A cozy spot on the couch with a view of the mountains through the mist will do just fine.

Climbing Higher

The steep ascent.

It looks like the top, but it's not.

Grasmere from the trail.

Alcock Tarn.

Research is very much like climbing a hill.  Part way up, you see what you think is the top, and in your enthusiasm rush forward to that peak only to find that it is merely a ridge hiding the real peak, which looms much, much higher above you.  It’s tempting to get discouraged at those moments, throw down one’s pack, and start thinking about the easier climb down.  In every research project I’ve ever undertaken, I hit a moment when I begin to think that what I thought was a peak of originality turns out to be merely an already discussed or commonly known point.  The work I've done is just part of the territory, and there’s much more ground to be covered if I’m going to find anything new.  It’s a moment of self-doubt, and I know from experience that the best thing to do is not to throw down the pack and head for the valley but to keep climbing.  Sometimes, though, it’s a good idea to take a break and reassess one’s resources and positions.  I hit that point on Monday.  Suddenly, everything I had been thinking seemed to have been said already, and I needed a break.

Fortunately for me, Tuesday was the most gorgeous day we’ve had here since we arrived in early January.  The sky was totally blue, brilliant blue, and Alcock Tarn was calling.  The tarn is high on a hill above our home, and we’ve been wanting to climb up to see it since we’ve arrived.  So I used the good weather as an excuse to lay aside the books for awhile and gain a new perspective.  It was worth it—not just because it was an absolutely perfect day to hike but because I did gain new views on the research too and began to see what I think is the way forward and the contributions I might be able to make.  And part of that perspective was to realize that I can’t possibly see the end of the path this early on.  I have to trust the process and continue to learn as I go. If I trust the intuitions coming to me and continue to work, I’ll be fine.  In the meantime, I am enjoying the process again, thanks to the glorious day of hiking up to the tarn.

It was a good thing we took Tuesday off to hike, because the cold weather returned with a vengeance on Wednesday and sent me scurrying back to the library.  I am appreciating Robert Woof’s work in William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage.  He has very helpfully gathered the important critical reviews of Wordsworth’s Excursion as well as some of the personal responses from Wordsworth’s friends.  My favorite review was by James Montgomery, a review that is sometimes categorized as negative due to his admonition that Wordsworth’s Christian message was not clear enough, but whose piece is actually a stunning summary of Wordsworth’s strengths and philosophy, as well as what Montgomery saw as his weaknesses.  One can see why this review was one that Wordsworth read and thought about; no critic is more valuable than the one who can see clearly what you are attempting to do and can critique accurately where you succeed and fail.  

Another highlight this week was the Jonathan Wordsworth Memorial Lecture given by Michael O’Neill, Professor of English at Durham University.  The Wordsworth Winter School has been in session this past week, and participants from the conference, as well as locals, packed the library for Michael O’Neill’s graceful exposition on Shelley’s ambivalent response to Wordsworth, a response which both showed reverence for and rejection of Wordsworth’s poetry.   The Memorial Lecture, hosted by the Wordsworth Trust, pays tribute to Jonathan Wordsworth’s scholarship, and O’Neill’s thoughtful and sensitive examination of both poets’ work was indeed a fitting tribute.