Wordsworth at Racedown, Dorset (September 1795 - June 1797)

Today I was hoping to have a view of Racedown Lodge in Dorset, such as this photo published in Dorset Life:

https://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2014/02/a-new-start-a-final-stop/

This is as much as I could see from outside the entrance gates. 

The house is well concealed behind a high hedge.

DT6 5QH

What a pity that there isn't even a sign to indicate that William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived here (rent-free), from September 1795 - June 1797. 

They felt very isolated even in those days.

It's not surprising, if this letter of October, 1795, reveals William's true opinion of the local people:

“The country people here are wretchedly poor; ignorant and overwhelmed with every vice that usually attends ignorance in that class, viz- lying and picking and stealing &c &c”. 

From William Wordsworth’s letter to William Matthews, Racedown, 24 October, 1795. 

"The peasants are miserably poor; their cottages are shapeless structures (I may almost say) of wood and clay - indeed they re not at all beyond what might be expected in savage life". 

From Dorothy Wordsworth's letter to Jane Marshall, Racedown, November 39th, 1795

From  Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty, and Power

by Gary Harrison (Professor Emeritus)

From Coleridge and Wordsworth in the West Country,
Tom Mayberry, 1992, Alan Sutton Publishing Limited


John Pinney (1740-1818), Plantation Owner (owner of Racedown Lodge)


"William is very much delighted with the whole family, particularly Mr. Pinney the father".

Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Marshall, September 2nd, 1795.


Poems about slavery by William Wordsworth


See also, excerpt from book Ferguson's Gang: The Remarkable Story of the National Trust Gangsters, by Polly Bagnall and Sally Beck, Pavilion, 2015

On the attitude to 'Wordsworth pilgrims':

I don't think that Salisbury Plain was first written (but perhaps revised?) at Racedown,
but I wonder if some of the seeds of the poem "Tintern Abbey" were sown there?

From Tintern Abbey (1798)

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

(Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798)


See also:

Evans, Bergen, and Hester Pinney. “Racedown and the Wordsworths.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 8, no. 29, 1932, pp. 1–18.



"The Ruined Cottage" Restored: Three Stages of Composition, 1795-1798
John A. Finch,  The Journal of English and Germanic Philology
Vol. 66, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), pp. 179-199 (21 pages)


Wordsworth's Early Drafts of "The Ruined Cottage" in 1797-98
Thomas M. Raysor, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology
Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1956), pp. 1-7 (7 pages)

Update: Sky TV, Wordsworth & Coleridge: Road Trip, with Frank Skinner and Denise Mina - a fascinating sequence exploring Racedown Lodge and garden.