The Wordsworth Museum at Grasmere

 

The Wordsworth Museum is part of the £6.2 Million "Re-Imagining Wordsworth Project". There is a huge collection of books, artwork, journals, letters, manuscripts, portraits, paintings, drawings, artefacts. letters, poetry and personal items. 

I was only briefly interested in "The Prelude" that the museum describes the earliest surviving version of 1805 as "Our Greatest Treasure". It may be that only scholars are interested in it's contents although it's renown is substantial. The two longest versions of the poem consist of 13 and 14 books. Wordsworth continued to revise and update this work all the way through to his death in 1850. None of this I knew.

I was more interested in Dorothy's Journals of May 1800 to January 1803. The Guardian have an excellent article "The Grasmere Journal: Seeing the Lake District through another Wordsworth's eyes".

However, apart from the obvious items about poetry and Dorothy's Journal, I had no idea that William Wordsworth wrote guides to the Lake District. Guide Books and Maps of the Lakes have always been of great interest to me, born out by our large collection of the same. This is the Fifth Edition of  Wordsworth's Guide through the District of The Lakes. I have made a separate post about this and the previous editions.

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The garden at the back of the museum and Dove Cottage is only small and not very interesting

But the cat was very friendly until two jets flew over very low and it disappeared into the bushes.