Scafell
Pike, England’s highest mountain is a popular place to climb, both as part of
the Three Peaks Challenge and for walkers in search of the sublime Lake
District scenery. But it wasn’t always this way.
In the
early 19th century – when mountaineering at all was still an unusual activity –
Scafell Pike was rarely climbed. But that didn’t stop Dorothy Wordsworth and
her friend Mary Barker ascending the mountain in October 1818. In an age when
women walking by themselves – let alone in the remote uplands – was frowned
upon, this was a daring feat.
Wordsworth
is best known as the poet William Wordsworth’s sister. The siblings lived
together for most of their lives, and Dorothy was an important influence over
William’s verse. But she was also an important figure in her own right, and her
account of climbing Scafell Pike is among the first written records of a
recreational ascent of the mountain – and it’s the earliest such account to be
written by a woman.
As a new
exhibition reveals, Wordsworth and Barker’s climb of Scafell Pike was not
simply a mountain climb, but a rebellious act that opened up mountains – and
mountaineering – for successive generations of women.
Walking
was an important part of the Wordsworths’ daily routine, but they were well
aware and proud of the fact that their
commitment to almost daily extensive walks was unusual. The Wordsworth siblings
walked together most days for the best part of four decades – Thomas De Quincey
estimated that William walked 175,000 miles over his lifetime, and Dorothy
can’t have fallen far short of this figure.
In her
letters, Dorothy repeatedly bragged about the speed with which she could walk –
and how little fatigued she was afterwards – until her mid-50s. In 1818, when
she was 46, she boasted to the writer Sara Coleridge that she could “walk 16
miles in four hours and three quarters, with short rests between, on a
blustering cold day, without having felt any fatigue”. That’s an impressive
pace of a little under four miles an hour around the Lake District hills.
Climbing
up Scafell Pike with Barker was perhaps Wordsworth’s most significant walking
achievement. Reading the letter in which she describes this feat suggests her
way of understanding the mountains went well beyond tales of sporting prowess.
She saw that examining the details of a mountainside could be just as rewarding
as the view from the summit.
In one moment
she describes a landscape that stretches out for miles from the summit on which
she stands. But at the next, when she looks down, she realises that though the
summit seemed lifeless at first glance, beauty could be found clinging to the
rocks:
I ought to
have described the last part of our ascent to Scaw Fell pike. There, not a
blade of grass was to be seen – hardly a cushion of moss, and that was parched
and brown; and only growing rarely between the huge blocks and stones which
cover the summit and lie in heaps all round to a great distance, like Skeletons
or bones of the Earth not wanted at the creation, and here left to be covered
with never-dying lichens, which the clouds and dews nourish; and adorn with
colours of the most vivid and exquisite beauty, and endless in variety. (quoted
with permission from The Wordsworth Trust.)
In
focusing on these details close to hand, rather than only rhapsodising on the
distant prospect, Wordsworth anticipates writers like Nan Shepherd – who is
best known for her account of the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain – by
proposing an alternative to more familiar accounts of mountaineering exploits
that emphasise a victory over a feminised Mother Nature when the climber
conquers the summit. Instead, Wordsworth recognises that paying close attention
reveals unexpected features even on a barren mountaintop.
Wordsworth’s
account of the ascent of Scafell was later included – without attribution – in
William Wordsworth’s Guide to the District of the Lakes. The implication was
that it was William who had undertaken the ascent. As a result, her legacy in
climbing Scafell is blurred into William’s, and many of the people who followed
in her footsteps were unaware that it was her they were emulating.
Despite this,
her ambitious walking practices helped to establish women’s walking as an
accepted habit – with many following in her footsteps. Wordsworth and countless
others after her made it clear that walking and other forms of mountaineering
were as much for women as for men, and in this way they helped to make the
mountains more culturally accessible places for everyone to explore.
By Joanna
Taylor. The Conversation , September 4, 2018.
Floating Island
Harmonious
Powers with Nature work
On sky,
earth, river, lake, and sea:
Sunshine
and storm, whirlwind and breeze
All in
one duteous task agree.
Once did
I see a slip of earth,
By
throbbing waves long undermined,
Loosed
from its hold; — how no one knew
But all
might see it float, obedient to the wind.
Might
see it, from the mossy shore
Dissevered
float upon the Lake,
Float,
with its crest of trees adorned
On which
the warbling birds their pastime take.
Food,
shelter, safety there they find
There
berries ripen, flowerets bloom;
There
insects live their lives — and die:
A
peopled world it is; in size a tiny room.
And thus
through many seasons’ space
This
little Island may survive
But
Nature, though we mark her not,
Will
take away — may cease to give.
Perchance
when you are wandering forth
Upon
some vacant sunny day
Without
an object, hope, or fear,
Thither
your eyes may turn — the Isle is passed away.
Buried
beneath the glittering Lake!
Its
place no longer to be found,
Yet the
lost fragments shall remain,
To
fertilize some other ground.
from : Poetry Foundation
William
and Dorothy Wordsworth moved to Grasmere in 1799, living in Dove Cottage until
1808. Dorothy’s journals document their quiet existence: daily walks,
afternoons with mutton pies, William’s headaches. The siblings composed poems
and letters as they walked through miles of hills and thickets; on occasion
visited by friends like Walter Scott, Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. In a 1797 letter, Coleridge described Dorothy’s taste as “a perfect
electrometer — it bends, protrudes, and draws in at subtlest beauties and most
recondite faults.”
Reading
the Grasmere journals is frustrating for a modern reader: with all the beauty
and skill demonstrated in the book, Dorothy stayed unrecognised in the shadow
of her famous older brother. She is cast into the same pejorative stereotype so
many Victorian women are: not very beautiful, especially once the teeth went;
alternatively a virgin, asexual or a lesbian – De Quincey hinted all three at
various points; a bit of an oddball labelled as both being a “creature apart”
above love and sex, and of being in love with her own brother. Reading the
journals, its hard to equate the passionate woman who cried with happiness at
seeing her garden after a period trapped indoors by sickness, as an inhuman
creature incapable of emotion or love.
Artist
Georgie Bennett had not heard of Dorothy Wordsworth before being asked to
illustrate a new edition of the Grasmere Journal for the Folio Society (“I remember
learning a little about William at school, but I don’t think she was mentioned,
which is a shame”) and had only been to the Lake District once before.
Returning to see the landscapes described firsthand revealed new beauty in the
landscape: “The most remarkable element has got to be the light – the light and
colour across the Lake District is incredibly beautiful and the way the lakes
mirror the fells and valleys is stunning. You can really see why [they] are so
intimately associated with the Romantic period and why the Wordsworths chose
this place to make their home … the whole mood of the landscape can change
dramatically with the weather. Dorothy describes this changing of the seasons
with such sensitivity.”
Bennett
walked in Dorothy’s footsteps across the Lake District, through Grasmere
village and to all the locations her journal describes: the church, the lake,
the island, Dove Cottage. She explored Rydal – “where Dorothy would often go to
send and receive letters” – as well as Grisedale Tarn, marked now as the spot
where Dorothy and William last saw their brother, John.
“Dorothy
lived a very independent and free life in Grasmere and she would spend her time
walking for miles,” Bennett says. “Reading her journal, it is evident that she
took great joy in experiencing and recording the world around her.” Bennett’s
favourite passage is from near the end of the journal, where Dorothy describes
a quiet moment looking over Grasmere with Mary, her brother’s wife:
I was much affected when I stood upon the
second bar of Sara’s Gate. The lake was perfectly still, the sun shone on Hill
and vale, the distant Birch trees looked like large golden Flowers – nothing
else in colour was distinct and separate but all the beautiful colours seemed
to be melted into one another, and joined together in one mass so that there
were no differences though an endless variety when one tried to find out.
Illustrating
The Grasmere Journal gave Bennett a fresh appreciation of the quality and
weight of Dorothy’s writing, outside the shadow of her more famous sibling.
“Dorothy did not just play an influential role in William’s life: she also led
an extraordinary life for a woman of her time and was clearly a gifted writer,”
she says. “I believe she was a kind and contemplative person who lived for the
simple things in life and greatly appreciated the awe of nature. It was an
absolute pleasure to illustrate her words – she was an independent thinker, a
beautiful writer. Quietly brilliant.”
The
Grasmere Journal: seeing the Lake District through another Wordsworth's eyes. By Sian Cain.
The Guardian , April 25, 2016.
So much, yet
so little, is known about Dorothy Wordsworth that she is impossibly attractive
to biographers and scholars, who glide down her empty expanses like skiers,
some of them leaping from helicopters to explore the stranger, more forbidding
peaks. (Did she have an incestuous relationship with her famous brother?
Probably not, and let’s not go there. But they were so determinedly intimate
that speculation will never cease.)
Ms. Wilson’s
new book, “The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth,” is billed as “a life,” but it is
not, happily, a proper biography. Ms. Wilson focuses primarily on the years
1800-3, when Dorothy, then in her late 20s and early 30s, lived with her
brother in the Lake District of England and kept her famous Grasmere Journals,
which were not published in full until 1958.
Dorothy
Wordsworth’s life was shaped by loss. Her mother, Anne, died when she was 6 and
William 7. Dorothy was sent to live with relatives in Yorkshire, while William
and his three brothers stayed with their father in Cumberland. She did not see
her brothers again for nine painful years. By then, she was determined not to
be exiled from William, her favorite, a second time.
The mysteries
about Dorothy start with her appearance. No images of her as a young woman are
extant. She was short, we know, and thin. Coleridge said of her, wonderfully:
“If you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary — if you
expected to find an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty.”
What’s
filtered down to us is a certain fiery yet ethereal spirit. In his poem
“Tintern Abbey,” her brother praised “the shooting lights” of her “wild eyes.”
Thomas de Quincey saw something of the “gipsy” in her, and called her the “very
wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known.”
About her love
of being outside, walking, Virginia Woolf would later write: “Her happiest
moments were passed tramping beside a jibbing horse on a wet Scottish road
without certainty of bed or supper. All she knew was that there was some sight
ahead, some grove of trees to be noted, some waterfall to be inquired into.”
painting
by Margaret Gillies ( 1803–1887) of William and Dorothy Wordsworth
William wrote
that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
Dorothy kept her own powerful feelings tamped down. Dorothy Wordsworth’s
happiest years, those spent living alone with her brother, ended in the fall of
1802, when William married Mary Hutchinson. (On the night before the wedding,
Dorothy slept wearing his wedding ring.)
She would go
on living with her brother and helping care for his new and rapidly expanding
family. As the years passed, their roles reversed. He began to take care of her
as she became addicted to opium and laudanum, grew fat, lost her teeth and
eventually her mind. William Wordsworth died in 1850, and Dorothy followed him
five years later.
A
Brother’s Keeper: The Other Wordsworth.
By Dwight Garner. New York Times
, February 24, 2009
A review
of The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A
Life. By Frances Wilson
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