'lucy / wordsworth she dwelt in the untrodden ways,beside the springs of dove...' Transcribes text but with significant errors when compared to wordsworth's original. The original first line 'she dwelt among the untrodden ways'.
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Groom
[Marginalia]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
William Wordsworth describes coach journey from London, having already observed that the coach guard was a former grocer on his first day in the new job: 'At Lancaster I happened to mention Grasmere in the hearing of one of the Passengers, who asked me immediately if one Wordsworth did not live there. I answered, "Yes." - "He has written," said he, "some very beautiful Poems; The Critics do indeed cry out against them, and condemn them as over simple, but for my part I read them with great pleasure, they are natural and true." - This man was also a Grocer.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: [a grocer] Anon
'In compliance with frequent entreaties I took the MSS [of The White Doe of Rylstone] to [Charles] Lamb's to read it, or part of it, one evening. There unluckily I found [William] Hazlitt and his Beloved [Sarah Stoddart] ... though I had the Poem in my hand I ... absolutely refused, to read it. But as they were very earnest in entreating me, I at last consented to read one Book ... '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Unknown
'Mr. Wilson came to us on Saturday morning and stayed till Sunday afternoon - William [Wordsworth] read the White Doe; and Coleridge's Christabel to him, with both of which he was much delighted.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Print: Serial / periodical
Transcription of William Wordsworh, "Fidelity" in letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 2 March 1806 (first four stanzas as in 1807 edition, followed by further eight varying from these).
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Unknown
Transcription of William Wordsworth, "Star-Gazers" appears in letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 15 November 1806.
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Century: Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth
Transcription of William Wordsworth, 'The Force of Prayer' appears in letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Marshall, 18 October 1807.
Century: Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Unknown
William Wordsworth to Daniel Stuart, 'Sunday Night, June 4th [1809]':
'Nothing but vexation seems to attend me in this affair of the Pamphlet [The Convention of Cintra]. Mr De Quincey according to my request sent me down ten stitched Pamphlets ... and it was not till today that I discovered that in two copies of those stitched the page which was cancelled remains as it first stood, the corrected leaf not having been substituted.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, 18 Novembr [1809]: 'Sara [Hutchinson] has been kept almost constantly busy in transcribing ... For William [Wordsworth] she has been transcribing the introduction to a collection of prints to be published by Mr. Wilkinson of Thetford (of which I believe you know the history as your husband's name is down among those of the subscribers). I hope you will be interested with William's part of the work (he has only finished the general introduction, being unable to do the rest until he has seen the prints). It is the only regular and I may say scientific account of the present and past state and appearance of the country that has yet appeared.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sara Hutchinson Manuscript: Unknown
'[Chaim Lewis] enthusiastically embraced the literature of an alien culture - "the daffodils of Herrick and Wordsworth... the whimsey of Lamb and the stirring rhythmic tales of the Ballads" and, yes, "the wry eloquence of Shylock".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Chaim Lewis Print: Book
Writing to Catherine Clarkson, 11 November 1814, Dorothy Wordsworth gives transcription of version of William Wordsworth, "Yarrow Visited".
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Unknown
Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, 11 November 1814: 'Your anecdote of Tom [?Thomas Clarkson] that he sate up all night reading William's poem gave me as much pleasure as anything I have heard of the effect produced by it ... It speaks highly in favour of Tom's feeling and enthusiasm that he was so wrought upon.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Tom ?Clarkson Print: Book
Dorothy Wordsworth to Sara Hutchinson, 18 February 1815: 'William and Mary and little Willy paid a visit to old Mrs Knott yesterday with the Ex[cursio]n in hand, William intending to read to the old Lady the history of the Grasmere Knight. She could not hear his loud voice; but understood the story very well when her Niece read it, and was delighted.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Print: Book
Dorothy Wordsworth to Sara Hutchinson, 18 February 1815:
'William and Mary and little Willy paid a visit to old Mrs Knott yesterday with the Ex[cursio]n in hand, William intending to read to the old Lady the history of the Grasmere Knight. She could not hear his loud voice; but understood the story very well when her Niece read it, and was greatly delighted. Today they have returned the Book, and poor Miss K has written a complimentary but alas! unintelligible note ... she concludes by saying ... that she had written to Kendal to order the Book. She says she had been told by Mrs Green and others that it was above their capacity, and of course above hers, but what she had read had given her infinite delight. I tell William that the family made a trading voyage of it. Certainly the Book would never have been bought by Miss K. if Willy and his Father and Mother had stayed quietly at home.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Miss Knott Print: Book
Dorothy Wordsworth to Sara Hutchinson, 16 March 1815: 'William has made a conquest of holy Hannah [More], though she had not seen the Book [The Excursion], had seen nothing but the extracts in the Edinbrough [sic] Review. She intends to buy it; but is waiting for a cheaper Edition.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Hannah More Print: Serial / periodical
Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, 31 December 1815: 'In reading the 3rd Book of the Excursion last night what a pang did I feel for our poor widowed Friend Mrs Luff when I came to these lines "Oh never let the Wretched, if a choice / Be left him, trust the freight of his distress / To a long voyage on the silent deep! ... "'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Unknown
William Wordsworth to Christopher Wordsworth, 1 January 1819: 'Mr Monkhouse will probably have shewn you the copy of Mr Russel's Letter [on Madras method of education], as I learn he has already done of mine to him ... '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Christopher Wordsworth Manuscript: Letter
Lord Lonsdale to William Wordsworth, 1 May 1820: 'I have read the Sonnets on the Duddon, and the notes annexed to them with great Pleasure ... the perusal of them afforded me infinite satisfaction.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Lord Lonsdale Print: Book
'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong Print: Book
'As one participant recalled, "Many exceptional debates come back to mind on such subjects as Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, Victorian Novelists, George Eliot, Meredith, Pepys and the Navy, Frederick the Great, Wordsworth, Shelley, Napoleon, where the speaking was of high level and the debating power considerable."'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ladies' Edinburgh Debating Society Print: Book
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Friday 1 August 1800: '... we [Dorothy and William Wordsworth, with S. T. Coleridge] all went together to Mary Point [in Bainriggs wood], where we sate in the breeze and the shade, and read Wm's poems.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Sunday 17 August 1800: 'Wm read us The Seven Sisters on a stone.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Saturday 23 August 1800: '[after walk to Ambleside] Did not reach home till 7 o'clock -- mended stockings and Wm. read Peter Bell. He read us the poem of Joanna, beside the Rothay by the roadside.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Saturday 23 August 1800: '[after walk to Ambleside] Did not reach home till 7 o'clock -- mended stockings and Wm. read Peter Bell. He read us the poem of Joanna, beside the Rothay by the roadside.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Monday 1 September 1800: 'We walked in the wood by the Lake. W. read Joanna, and the Firgrove, to Coleridge ... The morning was delightful ...'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Monday 1 September 1800: 'We walked in the wood by the Lake. W. read Joanna, and the Firgrove, to Coleridge ... The morning was delightful ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Monday 6 October 1800: 'After tea read The Pedlar.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Wednesday 22 October 1800: 'Wm. read after supper, Ruth etc.; Coleridge Christabel.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Thursday 6 November 1800: 'Wm. somewhat better [having been suffering from piles] -- read Point Rash Judgement.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Monday 21 December 1801: '[while Mary Hutchinson walked to Ambleside] I stayed at home and clapped the small linen. Wm. sate beside me, and read The Pedlar.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Monday 21 December 1801: 'In the afternoon ... I mended Wm.'s stockings while he was reading The Pedlar.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Letter
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, about how she spent Saturday, 23 January 1802: '[after walking in cold] O how comfortable and happy we felt ourselves, sitting by our own fire ... We talked about the Lake of Como, read in the Descriptive Sketches, looked about us, and felt that we were happy.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William and Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Sunday 7 February, 1802: 'We sate by the fire, and ... read the Pedlar, thinking it done; but lo! though Wm. could find fault with no one part of it, it was uninteresting, and must be altered.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William and Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Wednesday 10 February, 1802: '... we read the first part of the poem [ie The Prelude] and were delighted with it ...'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy and William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Saturday 13 February, 1802: 'William read parts of his Recluse aloud to me.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Monday 22 February, 1802: ' ... Mr. Simpson came in. Wm. began to read Peter Bell to him, so I carried my writing to the kitchen fire.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Thursday 4 March 1802: 'After Tea I worked and read the L[yrical]. B[allads]., enchanted with the Idiot Boy.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Book
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Friday 5 March 1802: '... read the L[yrical]. B[allads]., got into sad thoughts, tried at German, but could not go on. Read L[yrical]. B[allads]. '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Book
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Friday 5 March 1802: '... read the L[yrical]. B[allads]., got into sad thoughts, tried at German, but could not go on. Read L[yrical]. B[allads]. '
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Print: Book
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Tuesday 9 March 1802: 'We sate by the fire in the evening, and read The Pedlar over.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William and Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Sunday 14 March 1802: 'Mr. Simpson came in just as [William Wordsworth] was finishing the Poem [The Butterfly]. After he was gone I wrote it down and the other poems, and I read them all over to him.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Monday 15 March 1802: 'We sate reading the poems, and I read a little German.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William and Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Wednesday 17 March 1802: 'I went and sate with W. and walked backwards and forwards in the orchard till dinner time. He read me his poem.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Wednesday 17 March 1802: '... we sate a while ... [in the orchard]. I left ... [William Wordsworth], and he nearly finished the poem ... I went to bed before him -- he came down to me, and read the Poem to me in bed.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Saturday 20 March 1802: 'After tea Wm. read The Pedlar.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Sunday 18 April 1802: 'I went to drink tea at Luff's ... William met me at Rydale ... We sate up late ... He met me with the conclusion of the poem of the Robin [ie "The Robin and the Butterfly"]. I read it to him in bed. We left out some lines.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Dorothy Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, Tuesday 4 May 1802, describing excursion to local river and waterfall: 'We [Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and S. T. Coleridge] ... rested upon a moss-covered rock, rising out of the bed of the river. There we lay ... and stayed there till about 4 o'clock. William and C[oleridge]. repeated and read verses.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Sheet
' ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] used to go for picnics at Porto Fino, loaded with books of verse, and Mrs Thompson and Mr [Alfred] Strettell would read aloud to them from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Christiana Thompson Print: Book
' ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] used to go for picnics at Porto Fino, loaded with books of verse, and Mrs Thompson and Mr [Alfred] Strettell would read aloud to them from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Baker Strettell Print: Book
Alice Meynell recalls childhood reading: 'In quite early childhood I lived upon Wordsworth ... When I was about twelve I fell in love with Tennyson, and cared for nothing else until, at fifteen, I discovered Keats and then Shelley.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson Print: Book
?Do you sympathise with me when I say that the only writer whom I have been able to read with pleasure through this nightmare is Wordsworth? I used not to care for him especially; but now I love him. He is so thoroughly manly & tender & honest as far as his lights go that he seems to me the only consoler. I despise most of your religious people, who cultivate their maudlin humours & despise even more your sentimentalist of the atheist kind; but old W. W. is a genuine human being, whom I respect.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen Print: Book
" But I read with unchecked voracity, and in several curious directions...I made aquaintance... with Wordsworth, for the exercise of whose magic I was still far too young."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Gosse Print: Book
Deborah Epstein Nord, The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (1985) noted as "especially interesting ... in its discussion of Webb's ... reading of autobiographies (such as John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, George Sand's Histoire de ma vie, and Wordsworth's Prelude ..."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Beatrice Webb Print: Book
"One windfall came [to Hannah Mitchell] from a passing walker, who asked if the family liked reading poetry. Although only familiar with verse in the local paper, Mitchell quickly answered in the affirmative ... The walker (whom years later Mitchell recognised as the model Manchester employer Hans Renold) left her his copy of Wordsworth's poems, which Mitchell read and memorized until her mother removed them since they 'wasted' her time."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Hannah Mitchell Print: Book
David Bleich, "Gender Interests in Reading and Language": "I first 'understood' Wordsworth when I heard his poetry read by his descendent, Jonathan Wordsworth, some years ago."
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Century: Reader/Listener/Group: Jonathan Wordsworth
Stephen Gill, "Copyright and the Publishing of Wordsworth, 1850-1900": "Many eminent Victorians -- George Eliot, Mill, Ruskin, and Tennyson ... read Wordsworth in the collections [of his poetry] published in his lifetime ..."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot Print: Book
Stephen Gill, "Copyright and the Publishing of Wordsworth, 1850-1900": "Many eminent Victorians -- George Eliot, Mill, Ruskin, and Tennyson ... read Wordsworth in the collections [of his poetry] published in his lifetime ..."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Stuart Mill Print: Book
Stephen Gill, "Copyright and the Publishing of Wordsworth, 1850-1900": "Many eminent Victorians -- George Eliot, Mill, Ruskin, and Tennyson ... read Wordsworth in the collections [of his poetry] published in his lifetime ..."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
Stephen Gill, "Copyright and the Publishing of Wordsworth, 1850-1900": "Many eminent Victorians -- George Eliot, Mill, Ruskin, and Tennyson ... read Wordsworth in the collections [of his poetry] published in his lifetime ..."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
Stephen Gill, "Copyright and the Publishing of Wordsworth, 1850-1900": "In 1870 Moxon decided to launch a new edition [of Wordsworth's poetry] ... prefaced by an essay from William Michael Rossetti. When the Wordsworths saw it ... they were outraged. Not only had Rossetti made some factual errors, he had presented the poet in an unflattering light ..."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Wordsworth Family Print: Book
Stephen Gill, "Copyright and the Publishing of Wordsworth, 1850-1900": "On a visit to the Quantocks... William Hale White, 'Mark Rutherford,' reread The Excursion, book 1, and commented, 'Much of the religion by which Wordsworth lives is very indefinite. [...]' ... What he quotes in his journal is the conclusion of the Pedlar's 'natural wisdom' in its pre-1845 version."
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Hale White Print: Book
'George Howell, bricklayer and trade unionist..."read promiscuously. How could it be otherwise? I had no real guide, was obliged to feel my way into light. Yet perhaps there was a guidance, although indefinite and without distinctive aim". Howell groped his way through literature "on the principle that one poet's works suggested another, or the criticisms on one led to comparisons with another. Thus: Milton - Shakespeare; Pope-Dryden; Byron-Shelley; Burns-Scott; Coleridge-Wordsworth and Southey, and later on Spenser-Chaucer, Bryant-Longfellow, and so on". By following these intertextual links, autodidacts could reconstruct the literary canon on their own'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: George Howell Print: Book
"I stayed for the night in Derby, visiting its various printing offices in search of a job, but without success, and, hugging the shore of the river Derwent, made for Matlock on the following morn. I had read the whole of Wordsworth's Sonnets and, penniless as I was, I enjoyed the journey."
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Bedford Leno Print: Book
"[in November 1803, when Coleridge was thirty-one] Wordsworth had been reading Shakespeare's sonnets in Coleridge's copy of a set of the Works of the British Poets, in which both he and Coleridge's brother-in-law Robert Southey had made manuscript notes. Taking up the Shakespeare volume and coming upon a pencilled note of Wordsworth's critical of the sonnets, Coleridge answered with a long note of his own, in ink [disagreeing with Wordsworth's judgements]."
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Manuscript: annotations in printed text
'I am reading Wordsworth with one of the younger classes but it is difficult to explain to people of purely Indian associations Wordsworth's love for nature.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sir Walter Raleigh Print: Book
'Lancashire journalist Allen Clarke (b.1863), the son of a Bolton textile worker, avidly read his father's paperback editions of Shakespeare and ploughed through the literature section (Chaucer, Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Milton, Pope, Chatterton, Goldsmith, Byron, Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt) of the public library. With that preparation, he was winning prizes for poems in London papers by age thirteen...[he] went on to found and edit several Lancashire journals'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Allen Clarke Print: Book
'Soon Pritchett was reading Penny Poets editions of "Paradise Regained", Wordsworth's "Prelude", Cowper, and Coleridge. He formulated plans to become Poet Laureate by age twenty-one'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Victor Sawdon Pritchett Print: Book
'Uncle Richard had adored Ruskin, and worshipped Morris, and had slept for years with a copy of "In Memoriam" under his pillow. He told me once how he and his friends used to wait outside the bookshops in the early morning, when they heard that a new volume of Tennyson was to come out. He had read all Browning too, and all Wordsworth, and Carlyle, in fact nearly everything contemporary; and he constantly re-read the Classics in their own classic tongues... a triumph of timing occurred once when he was listening to the Thunderstorm in the Pastoral Symphony, and reading the thunderstorm in "Oedipus at Colonus", and a real thunderstorm took place!'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Litchfield Print: Book
'One would be called upon to read aloud, say, Wordsworth's "Excursion" with her - Wordsworth was her religion - but one was never able to read more than two or three consecutive lines without stopping to discuss exactly what the words meant; or, alternatively, for her to give messages to Janet.'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gwen Raverat Print: Book
?The gentle Cowper was my earliest favourite, a small second-hand copy of his poems, which I bought for eighteen pence, being the first book I bought for myself. It emptied my pocket, but I walked home, as I had walked to Newcastle (a distance some eighteen miles to and fro) with a light head, now and then reading as I fared along. Longfellow, Pope, Milton, Wordsworth and other poets were soon afterwards added to my little collection. I read them all. Many passages have clung to my memory, a life-long possession, giving, with their music, sometimes inspiration, sometimes solace in the conflicts and sorrows of life.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
?In one of my early schoolbooks, indeed, I had read "Lucy Gray" and "We are seven". The music of these simple lays had charmed my boyish fancy and lingered in my memory.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
?In one of my early schoolbooks, indeed, I had read "Lucy Gray" and "We are seven". The music of these simple lays had charmed my boyish fancy and lingered in my memory.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
?Joe was never tired of expatiating on the beauties and grandeur of Wordsworth, and my lack of responsiveness must have occasionally surprised him. When he selected some of the shorter poems ? "The Daffodils", "The Highland Girl", "The Solitary Reaper" and other gems ? and invited me to read them aloud, Joe?s quick ear soon detected that I read with the spirit as well as with the understanding, and, thus tutored, I quickly became a devoted Wordsworthian.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
'I have begun the Eumenides, having finished the Choephorae. We are reading Wordsworth in the evenings - at least G. is reading him to me'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Henry Lewes Print: Book
'G. has finished "the Excursion", which repaid us for going to the end by an occasional fine passage even to the last.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Henry Lewes Print: Book
'In the [italics]Autobiography[end italics] he tells us of the impact of Byron on him and his friend Dave: "His influence on Dave was so great that it was publicly shown to all the boys and girls in the chapel's schoolroom... While we were playing kiss in the ring, singing and laughing... Dave would lean his figure... against a pillar, biting his lips and frowning at our merrymaking"... His friend soon tired of this Byronic posing, but Davies marks the occasion as the first time he was really attracted to poetry with enjoyment and serious purpose. He went on to read Shelley, Marlowe's plays, and some further Shakespeare. Wordsworth failed to attract him, though he later studied him very diligently'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Henry Davies Print: Book
?Joe was never tired of expatiating on the beauties and grandeur of Wordsworth, and my lack of responsiveness must have occasionally surprised him. When he selected some of the shorter poems ? "The Daffodils", "The Highland Girl", "The Solitary Reaper" and other gems ? and invited me to read them aloud, Joe?s quick ear soon detected that I read with the spirit as well as with the understanding, and, thus tutored, I quickly became a devoted Wordsworthian.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
?Joe was never tired of expatiating on the beauties and grandeur of Wordsworth, and my lack of responsiveness must have occasionally surprised him. When he selected some of the shorter poems ? "The Daffodils", "The Highland Girl", "The Solitary Reaper" and other gems ? and invited me to read them aloud, Joe?s quick ear soon detected that I read with the spirit as well as with the understanding, and, thus tutored, I quickly became a devoted Wordsworthian.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
'As to what they read [at the Gower Street School in the 1880s] -- and [...] Lucy Harrison [headmistress] read aloud to them untiringly -- it must be what went deepest and lifted highest -- Shakespeare, Dante in Cary's translation, Blake, Wordsworth, and [...] [Miss Harrison's] own favourites, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, Coventry Patmore [...] A reading which all [...] [Miss Harrison's] pupils heard often, and never forgot, was from Alice Meynell's "Preludes" of 1875 -- the sonnet "To a Daisy"'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Harrison, headmistress, Charlotte Mew, and other pupils at Gower Street school Print: Book
'Calls on Hookham and brings home Wordsworths Excursion of which we read a part - much disappointed - he is a slave'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Unknown
'Mary reads the "Excursion" all day & reads the "History of Margeret" to PBS'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin Print: Book
'This is to let you know that I am at present in the classiz neighbourhood of Bolton Abbey whither I was led the other day by some half-remembrance of a note to one of Wordsworth's poems which told with me (to speak the truth) more than the poem itself: said Wordsworth having stated ... that everything which the eyes of man could desire in a lordship was to be found at and about the Abbey aforesaid.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
Felicia Hemans to ?H. F. Chorley, 24 June 1830, describing visit to Wordsworth's home Rydal Mount: 'The whole of this morning, he [Wordsworth] kindly passed in reading to me a great deal from Spenser, and afterwards his own "Laodamia," my favourite "Tintern Abbey," and many of those noble sonnets which you, like myself, enjoy so much.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
Felicia Hemans to ?H. F. Chorley, 24 June 1830, describing visit to Wordsworth's home Rydal Mount: 'The whole of this morning, he [Wordsworth] kindly passed in reading to me a great deal from Spenser, and afterwards his own "Laodamia," my favourite "Tintern Abbey," and many of those noble sonnets which you, like myself, enjoy so much.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
Felicia Hemans to ?H. F. Chorley, 24 June 1830, describing visit to Wordsworth's home Rydal Mount: 'The whole of this morning, he [Wordsworth] kindly passed in reading to me a great deal from Spenser, and afterwards his own "Laodamia," my favourite "Tintern Abbey," and many of those noble sonnets which you, like myself, enjoy so much.'
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth
'Read the Excursion & Madoc.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin Print: Unknown
'Annabella was now reading Cowper's "Iliad" and annotating evey second line; she was studying Alfieri with the family-solicitor's daughter; for relaxation condescending to "Evelina". In "Evelina" she was disappointed, like a good many more of its readers - more perhaps than make the confession. There was study of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge as well, for everyone was reading them... Annabella waded through "Madoc". She found some passages wearisome but was convinced that Southey would one day be ranked high "among the ancient poets".'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke Print: Book
'Shelley... brings home Wordsworth's Excursion of which we read a part - much disapointed - He is a slave'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'I do not claim that I understood all Wordsworth's poems but I liked the descriptive parts and committed to memory all the more simple poems, thinking myself like his Lucy:
"A maid whom there was none to praise,
And very few to love."
But I spent so much time, which my mother called "wasted", over the book that she took it away, threatening to burn it.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Hannah Mitchell Print: Book
[Item transcribed into a commonplace book]: [Untitled] ; [Text] 'And the lady prayed in heaviness/ That looked not for relief/ But slowly did her succour come/ And a patience to her grief? Wordsworth'; [8 lines ie last 2 verses only]
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Magdalene Sharpe- Erskine Print: Unknown
[Marginalia]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
'Then, when I was twelve we had a really good poetry book which contained extracts from "The Excursion", part of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage", "The Eve of Saint Agnes", "Adonais", "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", and Mathew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult". We were given "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and "The Pied Piper" to learn by heart in consecutive years. I never liked "The Pied Piper", which, being written consciously as a child's poem, made me feel conscious, and most of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" seemed unreal to me... The poems in the book which I liked best were "The Eve of Saint Agnes" and "Tristram and Iseult"...'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Book
'Our syllabus was large, covering at least twelve set books: two plays of Shakespeare's, two volumes of Milton and two of Keats; Chaucer, Sheridan, Lamb, Scott's "Old Mortality" and the first book of "The Golden Treasury", with its marvellous pickings of Coleridge, Shelly, Byron and, especially, Wordsworth, which excited me, at that age, more than any other poetry written.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'Lately I have been reading Wordsworth with joy, for almost the first time. "Michael" quite overcame me by its perfect simplicity & power. I have read it about ten times lately.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'After dinner look over W. W.[ordsworth]'s Poems'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Godwin Print: Book
[Mary Shelley's Reading List for 1815. Only those titles not mentioned in journal entries are given separate database entries. xs denote books also read by Percy Shelley - again, only those not mentioned in journal entries are indicated separately in the database]
'Posthumous Works. 3.
Sorrows of Werter
Don Roderick - by Southey
Gibbons Decline & fall.
x Paradise Regained
x Gibbons Life and Letters - 1st edition 2
x Lara
New Arabian Nights 3
Corinna
Fall of the Jesuits
Rinaldo Rinaldini
Fo[n]tenelle's Plurality of the Worlds
Hermsprong
Le diable boiteux
Man as he is.
Rokeby.
Ovid's Metamo[r]phoses in Latin
x Wordsworth's Poems
x Spenser's Fairy Queen
x Life of the Philipps
x Fox's History of James II
The Reflector
Wieland.
Fleetwood
Don Carlos
x Peter Wilkins
Rousseau's Confessions.
x Espriella's Letters from England
Lenora - a poem
Emile
x Milton's Paradise Lost
X Life of Lady Hamilton
De l'Alemagne - by Made de Stael
3 vols. of Barruel
x Caliph Vathek
Nouvelle Heloise
x Kotzebue's account of his banishment to Siberia.
Waverly
Clarissa Harlowe
Robertson's Hist. of america
x Virgil
xTale of Tub.
x Milton's speech on Unlicensed printing
x Curse of Kehama
x Madoc
La Bible Expliquee
Lives of Abelard and Heloise
The New Testament
Coleridge's Poems.
1st vol. Syteme de la Nature
x Castle of Indolence
Chattertons Poems.
x Paradise Regained
Don Carlos.
x Lycidas.
x St Leon
Shakespeare's Play. Part of which Shelley reads aloud
Burkes account of civil society
x Excursion
Pope's Homer's Illiad
x Sallust
Micromegas
x Life of Chauser
Canterbury Tales
Peruvian letters.
Voyages round the World
Pluarch's lives.
x 2 vols of Gibbon
Ormond
Hugh Trevor
x Labaume's Hist. of the Russian War
Lewis's tales
Castle of Udolpho
Guy Mannering
Charles XII by Voltaire
Tales of the East'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'This modern fashion [in the study of poetry in schools] of treating noble thoughts, feelings, and principles, set forth in prose or verse, merely as the material for grammatical analysis, appears to my prejudiced mind to be a kind of intellectual vivisection. The life is destroyed in the act of discovering and distinguishing the elements of which its body os composed. A young friend of mine said to me that she had 'done' the story of Margaret, in the Excursion, with notes, for a correspondence class [...] All that she had retained from this 'doing' was, as far
as I can gather, nothing but the fact that she had 'done' it. Feeling, admiration, there was none. The poetry had been a lesson to be "got through."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'S. reads Wordsworths Poems aloud in the evening'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Thursday Sept. 15th. Read Emile -- Write i[n] my Common Place Book [...] Shelley reads us
the Ancient Mariner [...] Read in the Excursion -- the Story of Margaret very beautiful.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
''Wednesday Oct. 5th. [...] Read Political Justice Shelley reads aloud the Ancient Mariner. &
Mad [...] Mother.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Tuesday March 16th. Go in the Morning to the Gardens of the Villa Borghese -- sit on the steps of the temple of Esculapius and read Wordsworth'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'Sunday Nov. [...] 27th. [...] Mr. Armfeld & the little Bielfeld spent the Evening -- we read
Wordsworth's Ballad of Simon Lee & then we talked.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'Read 2 book of Horace - Read Undine & c - S. finishes the 3 vol of Carendon aloud & reads Peter Bell - he reads Plato's republic'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to John Kenyon, 13 April 1842:
'I send you back the [italics]two[end italics] books with a great many thanks.
'The Tragedy will be considered probably "naught" as a whole, but of considerable entity of
beauty in its detached parts. It appears to [italics]me[end italics] that there are even fine
dramatic touches in it although it is not a fine tragedy [...] For the rest -- there is much which
is beautiful & powerful -- only you have [end italics]to dig for it[end italics] -- Do read the
sonnets to the painter .. & the next palinodia sonnet -- & the one beginning "A Poet" -- & that
composed on May morning 1838'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 13 April 1842:
'Dear Mr Kenyon lent me Wordsworth's new volume two days ago -- & I have read the last line
& end gratefully to the poet. The tragedy [italics]fails[end italics] [...] yet has more dramatic
feature occasionally than I had expected to find [...] Among the other poems there are some
four or five sonnets which are supremely excellent [makes other criticisms]'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 25 March 1843:
'Mr Kenyon came to see me yesterday [...] and he brought & read to me a letter from Mr
Wordsworth to Mr Crabbe Robinson speaking with great feeling of the release of the poor
Laureate [i.e. the death of Robert Southey]'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Kenyon Manuscript: Letter
Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd, 18 May 1843:
'[William Wordsworth] had the kindness to send me the poem upon Grace Darling when it first
appeared: and with a curious mixture of feelings [...] I yet read it with so much pain from the
nature of the subject, that my judgement was scarcely free to consider the poetry [...]
'[italics]But[end italics] ... I do confess to you my dear friend, that I suspect, .. through the
mist of my sensations, .. the poem in question to be very inferior to his former poems'.
Unknown
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett
Thomas Westwood to Elizabeth Barrett, 27 December 1843:
'On my return from a long, weary walk through mud & mist, yesterday morning, my eyes
were gladdened by the sight of your letter [...] Thank you for those lines of Wordsworth's
[epitaph for Robert Southey, transcribed by Barrett in her letter, of 26 December 1843]'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Serial / periodical
Elizabeth Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 16 December 1844:
'I saw the sonnet [of Wordsworth] [...] which gave me so much offence by the prose note attached to it beginning .. "This is not mere poetry, but truth" -- or something to that effect!
So unworthy of a poet, as giving in to the vulgar notion of poetry & truth being different things! Also, I saw Mon[c]kton Milnes's sonnet in reply -- very good -- but not one of his best sonnets.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Newspaper
Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 18 September 1936:
'The Prelude. Have you read it lately? Do you know, it's so good, so succulent, so suggestive,
that I have to hoard it, as a child keeps a crumb of cake? And then people say he's dull!'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
5 April 1918: 'Off we went to Asheham on Thursday [21 March] [...] my memory is most centred
upon an afternoon reading in the garden. I happened to read Wordsworth; the poem which ends
"what man has made of man".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'Wilson who is one of the most noble fellows in existence swore terribly about the [italics] fishing [end italics] and challenges you fairly to a trial but after a serious perusal of "Wordsworth's excursion" together and no little laughter and some parodying he has with your assistance fairly confessed to me yesterday that he now holds the [italics]school [end italics] in utter contempt Wordsworth is really a fine intelligent man and one that must ever be respected but I fear the [italics] Kraken [end italics] has peppered him for this world - with its proportion of beauties (by the by they are but thin sown) it is the most heavy and the most absurd work that I ever perused without all exception - Southey's new work will be published in Novr. I have had the peculiar privilege of perusing it from end to end. It is much the best thing that was ever produced by the [italics] pond school [end italics] I assure you my lord it is and will raise Southey much in character as a poet The story moves a little heavily for some time but it is wild tragical and the circumstances in which the parties are placed extremely interesting'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: James Hogg and John Wilson Print: Book
'Wordsworth and Southey have each published a new poem price of each /2:2. Southey's is a noble work the other is a very absurd one but has many most beautiful and affecting passages - Scott is in the press - the beginning is beautiful'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: James Hogg Print: Book
'I suppose you have heard what a crushing review [Jeffrey] has given [Wordsworth]. I still found him persisting in his first asseveration that it was heavy but what was my pleasure to find he had only got to the 17 division I assured him he had the marrow of the thing to come at as yet'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Francis Jeffrey Print: Book
'I hear nothing of the literary world very interesting except that people are commending some of Lord Byron's melodies as incomparably beautiful and laughing immoderately at Mr Wordsworth's new prefaces which certainly excel all that ever was written in this world in egotism vanity and absurdity'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: James Hogg Print: Book
'I have brought Coleridge with me, & am [italics] doing [end italics] him & Wordsworth [-] [italics] fit place for the latter! [end italics]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
Wednesday 29 May 1940: 'Reading masses of Coleridge & Wordsworth letters of a night -- curiously untwisting & burrowing into that plaited nest [...] Reading Thomas A'Quinas [sic] [1933] by Chesterton. His skittish over ingenious mind makes one shy (like a horse). Not straightforward, but has a good engine in his head.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Thursday 13 June 1940: '[Lord] Haw-Haw, objectively announcing defeat -- victory on his side of the line, that is -- again & again, left us about as down as we've yet been. We sat silent in the 9 o'clock dusk; & L. could only with difficulty read Austen Chamberlain. I found the Wordsworth letters my only drug.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'I think that if you can get hold of a portable 'Excursion' it is a capital book to have with you; also that vol (1st second, [italics] or [end italics] third, I forget whh) of de Quincey's Miscellanies that relates to the Lakes, - places & people as they were in his day. Try for this last, if you don't get it elsewhere at Mrs Nicholson's circulating library at Ambleside'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
'I have a present of the poetical Register no 7 as a testimony of respect & therein I find [italics] Horace in London [end italics]. A friend has previously mentioned the work but in high terms that occurred [italics] too [end italics] often as I read, yet there is, (no Question), Ability & music in this Mock-bird, or rather these, for there are two I am told Messrs Smiths, Brothers & Authors of ye rejected Addresses where you & I & Mr Southey & I know not who shine in the eye of the public, & Wordsworth whom I read & laughed at till I caught a touch of his disease & now really like many of the Simplicities'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Crabbe Print: Unknown
'When she [Emily Coleman] reads and loves anything she makes it part of her, underlining with a peculiar heaviness... If you borrow Emily's Wordsworth you will read not Wordsworth but Emily's Wordsworth. She will fearlessly correct and alter passages. She does not read; she flings herself upon and passionately possess a work...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'When she [Emily Coleman] reads and loves anything she makes it part of her, underlining with a peculiar heaviness... If you borrow Emily's Wordsworth you will read not Wordsworth but Emily's Wordsworth. She will fearlessly correct and alter passages. She does not read; she flings herself upon and passionately possess a work...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Emily Coleman Print: Book
'Oh dear, [...] that's what comes of living alone in the rain and reading Wordsworth.'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vita Sackville-West
'Although Larkin had first read them [Auden and Isherwood] at KHS [his school], it wasn't until he reached Oxford that he began fully to appreciate their irony and ebullient detachment (he described Isherwood's first novel, "All the Conspirators", as being like "life photographed"). Eventually Larkin would praise Auden as "the first 'modern' poet, in that he could employ modern properties unselfconsciously". Reading him in St John's during his first term he felt:
"Auden rose like a sun. It is impossibly to convey the intensity of the delight felt by a ... mind reared on 'Drake's Drum', 'Westminster Bridge' and 'Ode to a Nightingale, when a poet is found speaking a language thrilling and beautiful, and describing things so near to everyday life that their once-removedness strikes like a strange cymbal. We entered the land, books in hand, like travellers with a guidebook... 'Poems', 'The Orators' and 'Look, Stranger!' seemed three fragments of revealed truth... To read 'The Journal of an Airman' was like being allowed half an hour's phone conversation with God".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin Print: Book
'The more I read of Mr. Hawthorne's writings the more intense does my admiration become. I
read over the other day a part of his "House of the Seven Gables" and I don't remember any
delineation of character under Shakespeare's that is to me so exquisitely fascinating as his of
Phoebe, and it is the one I think, among all his characters which mark him most of all as a
man of very great genius, for in the hands of any but such a man, instead of being as she is
"A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright
With something of an Angel light."
she would have been a common place stupid creature who only was good because she had not
will to be bad [...] The contrast too of the restless minded metaphysical Holgrave always
searching into the cause of things, and his tremendous delight in watching the development of
character are admirable [underlined]. This latter feature is I am sure a marking characteristic
of Mr. Hawthorne's and I just wish to warn him that though I have in thought [underlined]
quite an agonizing sympathy with him in it, yet when carried to such a pitch as he does in
practice that he won't give a hand to a pair of poor lovers that have fallen into the gutter on a
rainy night because his part is only to be a spectator. I have no patience with him, and beg to
say if I catch him at anything like that I will commit an assault upon him as sure as fate. I
should tell you, as more important than any thing that I can say on the subject, that for the
first time Papa read "The House of the Seven Gables" a few days ago [...] he said that if
anyone wished to give a very favorable notion to a non-German reader of Jean Paul Richter's
style of thought and sentiment they could not do it more successfully than by pointing out
many passages in it [i.e. the Hawthorne], and when I tell you that Papa admires him more
than any Author of his class by far, and has often regretted our not being German scholars
simply on his account you will have an idea....'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret De Quincey Print: Book
Passages quoted in E. M. Forster's Commonplace Book (1940) include remarks on value of cultural works for successive generations of civilised people from Lord Acton's Lecture on the Study of History ('A speech of Antigone, a single sentence of Socrates [...] come nearer to our lives than the ancestral wisdom of barbarians who fed their swine on the Hercynian acorns').
Forster responds with comment that 'Lord Acton is right, but [...] He forgot that that most people do not respond to culture or intellectual honesty [...] he appears to this generation as an old man lecturung in a cap and gown,' having also noted 'This afternoon (29-2-40) I was at Bishops Cross, where new born lambs were dying in the cold, and Hughie Waterson, a Nazi by temperament, was trying to save them [...] Him the ancestral wisdom inspired.'
Forster goes on to quote, for comparison, eight lines from The Prelude XII (opening 'I could no more / Trust the elevation which had made me one / With the great family which still survives [...]', and three lines from Wordsworth's 'Sonnet on Napoleon' (beginning with 'The great events with which old story rings'), continuing with remark:
'I glanced at these two books of the Prelude to see whether Wordsworth's Imagination and Taste had been impaired in the same way as my own.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
Passages quoted in E. M. Forster's Commonplace Book (1940) include remarks on value of cultural works for successive generations of civilised people from Lord Acton's Lecture on the Study of History ('A speech of Antigone, a single sentence of Socrates [...] come nearer to our lives than the ancestral wisdom of barbarians who fed their swine on the Hercynian acorns').
Forster responds with comment that 'Lord Acton is right, but [...] He forgot that that most people do not respond to culture or intellectual honesty [...] he appears to this generation as an old man lecturung in a cap and gown,' having also noted 'This afternoon (29-2-40) I was at Bishops Cross, where new born lambs were dying in the cold, and Hughie Waterson, a Nazi by temperament, was trying to save them [...] Him the ancestral wisdom inspired.'
Forster goes on to quote, for comparison, eight lines from The Prelude XII (opening 'I could no more / Trust the elevation which had made me one / With the great family which still survives [...]', and three lines from Wordsworth's 'Sonnet on Napoleon' (beginning with 'The great events with which old story rings'), continuing with remark:
'I glanced at these two books of the Prelude to see whether Wordsworth's Imagination and Taste had been impaired in the same way as my own.'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
Transcribed in E. M. Forster's Commonplace Book (1941), under heading 'Wordsworth on Machinery':
'"Nor shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar
The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar
To the Mind's gaining a prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision, whence
May be discovered what in soul you are."
'[Sonnets of the Imagination XLII]'
This followed by remarks: 'Right! The problem of 1941 has not been better put. And it could be so well put only by someone who had not all the facts.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
'Perhaps, I thought, Wordsworth or Browning or Shelley would have some consolation to offer; all through the War poetry was the only form of literature that I could read for comfort, and the only kind that I ever attempted to write.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Unknown
'I flung myself on my bed afterwards and tried to get some comfort from the volume of Wordsworth which had been the delight of my scholarship work in that long-ago that was already beginning to be labelled "pre-war".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
James Spedding to W. H. Thompson, 1834:
'Wordsworth's eyes are better, but not so well [...] Reading inflames them, and so does composing. I believe it was a series of Highland sonnets that brought on the last attack [...] He read me several, that I had not seen or heard before, many of them admirably good: also a long romantic wizard and fairy poem, of the time of Merlin and king Arthur, very pretty but not of the first order: but I should not have expected anything so good from him which was so much out of his beat.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Unknown
James Spedding to W. H. Thompson, 1834:
'Wordsworth's eyes are better, but not so well [...] Reading inflames them, and so does composing. I believe it was a series of Highland sonnets that brought on the last attack [...] He read me several, that I had not seen or heard before, many of them admirably good: also a long romantic wizard and fairy poem, of the time of Merlin and king Arthur, very pretty but not of the first order: but I should not have expected anything so good from him which was so much out of his beat.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Wordsworth Manuscript: Unknown
'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute [...] My father read them a great deal of Wordsworth, "the dear old fellow," as he called him [...] Fitzgerald notes again:
'"I could remember A. T. saying he remembered the time when he could see nothing in 'Michael' which he now read us in admiration [...]"
'My father also read Keats and Milton'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
From Hallam Tennyson's account of 'My Father's Illness [1888]':
'He read or had read to him at this time the following books or essays: Leaf's edition of the Iliad; the Iphigenia of Aulis, expressing "wonder at its modernness"; Matthew Arnold on Tolstoi; Fiske's Destiny of Man; Gibbon's History, especially praising the Fall of Constantinople; Keats [sic] poems; Wordsworth's "Recluse." Of this last he said: "I like the passages which have been published before, such as that about the dance of a flock of birds, driven by a thoughtless impulse [...]"
'He often looked at his Virgil, more than ever delighting in what he called "that splendid end of the second Georgic."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
'I admired many of his [Wordsworth's] pieces exceedingly, though I had not then seen his ponderous "Excursion"'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: James Hogg Print: Unknown
'There is nothing in nature that you may not get a quotation out of Wordsworth to suit, and a quotation too that breathes the very soul of poetry. There are only three books in the world that are worth the opening in search of mottos and quotations, and all of them are alike rich. These are, the Old Testament, Shakspeare, and the poetical works of Wordsworth, and, strange to say, the "Excursion" abounds most in them'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: James Hogg Print: Book
'There is nothing in nature that you may not get a quotation out of Wordsworth to suit, and a quotation too that breathes the very soul of poetry. There are only three books in the world that are worth the opening in search of mottos and quotations, and all of them are alike rich. These are, the Old Testament, Shakspeare, and the poetical works of Wordsworth, and, strange to say, the "Excursion" abounds most in them'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: James Hogg Print: Book
'Readings from Wordsworth were then given by Mrs Smith, Mrs Rawlings, Mrs Edminson and Miss Wallis.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Ann Smith Print: Book
'Readings from Wordsworth were then given by Mrs Smith, Mrs Rawlings, Mrs Edminson and Miss Wallis'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Rawlings Print: Book
'Readings from Wordsworth were then given by Mrs Smith, Mrs Rawlings, Mrs Edminson and Miss Wallis.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Edminson Print: Book
'Readings from Wordsworth were then given by Mrs Smith, Mrs Rawlings, Mrs Edminson and Miss Wallis'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Constance Wallis Print: Book
'a short paper on Wordsworth and Poetic diction was read by the Secretary'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Rawlings Print: Book
Robert Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 22 September 1797: '...but there is a man, whose name is not known in the world — Wordsworth — who has written great part of a tragedy, upon a very strange & unpleasant subject — but [MS obscured] is equal to any dramatic pieces, [MS obscured] I have ever seen.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Southey Manuscript: Unknown
Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, December 1896 - March 1897, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Gaston de Latour by Walter Pater, MA (Macmillan), Milman's History of Latin Christianity, Wordsworth's Complete Works in one volume with preface by John Morley (Macmillan, 7/6), Matthew Arnold's Poems. One volume complete. (Macmillan, 7/6), Dante and other Essays by Dean Church (Macmillan, 5/-), Percy's Reliques, Hallam's Middle Ages (History of), Dryden's Poems (1 vol. Macmillan. 3/6), Burns's Poems ditto, Morte D'Arthur ditto, Froissart's Chronicles ditto, Buckle's History of Civilisation, Marlowe's Plays, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (edited by A. Pollard 2 vols 10/-) Macmillan, Introduction to Dante by John Addington Symonds, Companion to Dante by A.J. Butler, Miscellaneous Essays by Walter Pater, An English translation of Goethe's Faust'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Print: Book
'Take Wordsworth's lines, page 189, of Saturn and his system, for type of his wide, thoughtful, as opposed to Tennyson's acute and passionate wisdom. (Examine passage I, p. 194, for Greek character.)'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
'Annabella was now [in 1812] reading Cowper's Iliad and annotating every second line; she was studying Alfieri with the family-solicitor's daughter; for relaxation condescending to Evelina. In Evelina she was disappointed [...] There was study of Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge as well, for everyone was reading them'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Isabella Milbanke Print: Book
'We have been reading the new edition of Wordsworth's poetry, in which there are several new things.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Wedgwood and the Miss Allens Print: Book
'Meeting held at 9 Denmark Road 14/4/31
F. E. Pollard in the chair
1. Minutes of last approved
[...]
5 The subject of Wordsworth was then taken[.]
Charles E. Stansfield gave us a sketch of his life which provoked some discussion. R H Robson
read from The Prelude both before and after supper.
H. R. Smith read “The Happy Warrior”.
Mrs Robson read “She was a Phantom of Delight”[.]
To Conclude F. E. Pollard gave a most interesting appreciation of Wordsworth’s work which
was followed by some discussion.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Reginald H. Robson Print: Book
'Meeting held at 9 Denmark Road 14/4/31
F. E. Pollard in the chair
1. Minutes of last approved
[...]
5 The subject of Wordsworth was then taken[.]
Charles E. Stansfield gave us a sketch of his life which provoked some discussion. R H Robson
read from The Prelude both before and after supper.
H. R. Smith read “The Happy Warrior”.
Mrs Robson read “She was a Phantom of Delight”[.]
To Conclude F. E. Pollard gave a most interesting appreciation of Wordsworth’s work which
was followed by some discussion.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Howard Smith Print: Book
'Meeting held at 9 Denmark Road 14/4/31
F. E. Pollard in the chair
1. Minutes of last approved
[...]
5 The subject of Wordsworth was then taken[.]
Charles E. Stansfield gave us a sketch of his life which provoked some discussion. R H Robson
read from The Prelude both before and after supper.
H. R. Smith read “The Happy Warrior”.
Mrs Robson read “She was a Phantom of Delight”[.]
To Conclude F. E. Pollard gave a most interesting appreciation of Wordsworth’s work which
was followed by some discussion.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary E. Robson Print: Book
'Meeting held at 70 Northcourt Avenue: 18. 6. 35.
Charles E. Stansfield in the Chair
1. Minutes of last read and approved.
2. The Secretary then read a letter from Marjorie C. Cole, expressing her interest in the Book
Club and offering us a book “Gone Rambling” by Cecil Roberts which she had recently read with
enjoyment. [...]
[...]
6. The large subject of London was then opened by Howard Smith. He spoke of the extraordinary
insistence of the divergent views as its origin, leaning to the opinion that it owed its beginnings
to to a variety of causes.
[...]
7. Extracts from Defoe’s Journal of the Great Plague were then read by Victor Alexander.
[...]
8. From Defoe we turned to Pepys, and Reginald Robson described the Great Fire.
[...]
9. We next enjoyed a delightful picture of old London which Edith Goadby gave us, making the
acquaintance of Gabriel Bardon the locksmith, his pretty daughter Dolly and Simon the
apprentice. It was all too short, but at least we left them happily seated before their jolly round
of beef, their Yorkshire cake and quaintly shaped jug of ale.
10. A further scene was depicted for us by Ethel Stevens, old Crosby Hall, Chelsea Hospital,
Cheyne walk as it used to be, and Carlyle’s house, where he entertained Tennyson in the
kitchen. We were introduced to John Stuart Mill and his great concern over the loss of his fiend’s
manuscript of the French Revolution, and we took glimpses at William de Morgan + Sir Thomas
More.
11. Finally Charles Stansfield read us Wordsworth’s Sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge,
and Henry Marriage Wallis quoted happily ten lines from William Morris.'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles E. Stansfield
'I have been reading some of Wordsworth ... I think 'Tintern Abbey' is quite lovely. It
seems to me Wordsworth has got a most wonderful way of putting into words
feelings that one can't explain.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emily Lytton Print: Book
'Mother has been reading "The Excursion" lately.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Lytton Print: Book
'I have often read the bit of Wordsworth that you quote ['She was a Phantom of
Delight'], and am very fond of it, and now I shall love it more and feel all that you
have told me as I read it.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Emily Lytton Print: Book
'I hope you are well, and are finding some solace in your duties. You must
find it hard to console aliens in England. They probably love England, and
now they are aliens indeed. There was a letter in the Northcliffe Times not
long ago from a lady who would make Bach an alien, a difficult job … You
spoke of the Jewish persecution by the Russians. The English papers are
allowed to speak of it now; at least there was a strong condemnation in a
book-review in the Daily News … The Times published a special supplement
of War-Poems on Monday. Did you see it? I think Hardy’s poem [“Song of
the Soldiers”) is most likely to survive. It stirs me much more than it first
did. On route marches now to occupy my mind, I am learning Wordsworth’s
Sonnetts and the first lines of Paradise Lost, for which I can find no praise.
It is too colossal. Too Bach-like.’
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ivor Bertie Gurney Print: Book
‘This morning that extraordinarily unequal collection "The Golden Treasury"
came out of its hiding place, and served to astonish me once more with its
lasting wonders of the “Intimations” Ode. But what I really want is a
Marcus Aurelius, a small cheap one. Would you send it me? The Gospels
annoy me by their emptiness, and the eloquence of St Paul though good
enough in some place is mere argumentative theology only too often … As
for news, you in England are far more fortunate than we. My self I love
newspapers when my brain is watery, and none I have seen that is not a
week old. In reserve however I was a hardened but often puzzled reader
of "Le Telegramme", "Le Journal", "Le Petit Parisien", "Le Matin".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ivor Bertie Gurney Print: Book
‘Here I am beside a French canal, watching the day, and remembering with
an ache what Glostershire is in such a season as September, and with
whom I usually spent the best of it—with Will Harvey … Yesterday, some
misbegotten fool took all my books and burned them. They were in a sack
and too near other rubbish sacks for safety as it seems. This includes the
French war songs I had promised … We are just going up again and will be
on business for a little while now. Old Pepys is a great man, really a great
man to be so absolutely interested in everything interesting. Of course he
is funny, but that is not the final impression left by the book … The article in
the Times Literary on the Navy was very good [“The Tradition of the Navy,”
31 August 1916, p.1] … I read a great deal of Kipling’s "Fringes of the Fleet"
in a shell hole, during one of the most annoying times we have had. It was
during heavy fatigue, and the Bosches spotted us and let fly with heavy
shrapnel and 5.9s … In books, after a careful survey, I find myself reduced
to Wordsworth’s "Excursion", and a few blitherings from the “Pastor” have
reduced me to a state of “wet” melancholy. (“Wet” is B.E.F. for half-witted.)
I bought that book from a 2d box in Putney, and the excruciatingly mild
engraving at the beginning alone is worth the money; but not to me. It is
lucky that some of my books were distributed, and can be begged back. But
alas! Walt Whitman and Browning are na poo.’
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ivor Bertie Gurney Print: Newspaper, Serial / periodical
‘I am afraid there is little hope at present of another portion of the Recluse, but it must delight
every lover of mankind to see how the influence of Wordsworth’s poetry is diverging, spreading
over society, benefitting [sic] the heart and soul of the Species, and indirectly operating upon
thousands, who haply, never read, or will read, a single page of his fine Volumes.’
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Hartley Coleridge Print: Book, Hartley is also referring to a 'reading' of W. Wordsworth's poetry outside any form of text
‘So true is Wordsworth’s observation (somebody has borrow’d my Wordsworth, and I’m like a
Jack Tar without his tobacco pouch) that the older we grow, the more we become attach’d to
things that typify Youth.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Hartley Coleridge Print: Book
‘I dined yesterday at Rydal [Mount] ... I read ‘Yarrow Revis[ited]’ - and some of the new Poems -
very sweet, but can’t talk about them here, for I’ve more to say than I’ve room for. All [the
Wordsworths] send their love.’
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Hartley Coleridge Print: Book
‘I hope Mr. Wordsworth feels some consolation in the complete victory of his poetic fame. He
may at least feel assured, that no Great Poet ever lived to see his name of so full an age as
Wordsworth has done. His last volume [Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems] is exquisite.’
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Hartley Coleridge Print: Book
‘Mr. Wordsworth looks older but keeps up his spirits wonderfully; his character, like his
poetry, is much softened by age. I know not how Derwent [Coleridge] can think his last
volume [Yarrow Revisted, and Other Poems] poor and degenerate. This is, indeed, nothing like
the Ode on Immortality, or the finer parts of the Excursion, there is neither the same
profundity of thought nor the same solar warmth of feeling - but there is a vein of tenderness,
sweetness, and beauty which is almost new. ... I do wish, however, that there had been a
little less of Lowther Castle, and that he had not call’d poor old Lady Lonsdale a Nymph.’
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Hartley Coleridge Print: Book
‘...I think I perceive in Wordsworth’s last volume [Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems], a
decided inclination to the playful, the elegant and the beautiful; with an almost studied
exclusion of the profound feeling and severe thought which characterised the offspring of his
middle age. This can be the only reason why Derwent [Coleridge] thinks these poems poor
and degenerate; for they are as perfect, perhaps more perfect, in their kind than any of their
predecessors: but the kind is less intense, and therefore, incapable of that unique excellence
which the disciples adore. ...’
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Hartley Coleridge Print: Book
