The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William

Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland,[3]

part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. His sister, the
poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the
following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard,
the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805
when the ship of which he was captain, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south
coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.[4]

Wordsworth's father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and,
through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. He was frequently away
from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with
him and remained distant from him until his death in 1783.[5] However, he did encourage
William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit to memory large portions of verse,
including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. William was also allowed to use his
father's library. William also spent time at his mother's parents' house in Penrith,
Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors, but did not get along with his grandparents
or his uncle, who also lived there. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the
point of contemplating suicide.[6]

Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality
in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families, where he
was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included
pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day
and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else.
It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who later became
his wife.[7]

After the death of his mother, in 1778, Wordsworth's father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar
School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire.
She and William did not meet again for another nine years.

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European
Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge. He received his
BA degree in 1791.[8] He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at
Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the
beauty of their landscape. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he
toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.[citation
needed]

Relationship with Annette Vallon[edit]

In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enchanted with
the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in
1792 gave birth to their daughter Caroline. Financial problems and Britain's tense relations
with France forced him to return to England alone the following year.[9] The circumstances of
his return and his subsequent behaviour raised doubts as to his declared wish to marry
Annette, but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. The Reign of
Terror left Wordsworth thoroughly disillusioned with the French Revolution and the outbreak
of armed hostilities between Britain and France prevented him from seeing Annette and his
daughter for some years.

With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister
Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline in Calais. The purpose of the visit was to prepare
Annette for the fact of his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson.[9] Afterwards he wrote
the sonnet "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," recalling a seaside walk with the 9-
year-old Caroline, whom he had never seen before that visit. Mary was anxious that
Wordsworth should do more for Caroline and upon Caroline's marriage, in 1816, when
Wordsworth settled £30 a year on her (equivalent to £1360 as of the year 2000). The
payments continued until 1835, when they were replaced by a capital settlement.[10][11]

First publication and Lyrical Ballads[edit]

Wordsworth in 1798, about the time he began The Prelude.[12]

The year 1793 saw the first publication of poems by Wordsworth, in the collections An
Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. In 1795 he received a legacy of 900 pounds from
Raisley Calvert and became able to pursue a career as a poet.

It was also in 1795 that he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly
developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Alfoxton
House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together
Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an
important work in the English Romantic movement.[13] The volume gave neither
Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems,
"Tintern Abbey", was published in this collection, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the
author, and included a preface to the poems.[14] It was augmented significantly in the next
edition, published in 1802.[15] In this preface, which some scholars consider a central work of
Romantic literary theory, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type
of verse, one that is based on the "real language of men" and avoids the poetic diction of
much 18th-century verse. Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility," and calls his own poems in the book "experimental". A fourth and final edition
of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.[16]

The Borderers[edit]
Between 1795-97, Wordsworth wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy set during
the reign of King Henry III of England, when Englishmen in the North Country came into
conflict with Scottish rovers. He attempted to get the play staged in November 1797, but it
was rejected by Thomas Harris, the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, who proclaimed
it "impossible that the play should succeed in the representation". The rebuff was not received
lightly by Wordsworth and the play was not published until 1842, after substantial revision.[17]

Germany and move to the Lake District[edit]

Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge travelled to Germany in the autumn of 1798. While
Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the journey, its main effect on Wordsworth was to
produce homesickness.[9] During the harsh winter of 1798–99 Wordsworth lived with Dorothy
in Goslar, and, despite extreme stress and loneliness, began work on the autobiographical
piece that was later titled The Prelude. He wrote a number of other famous poems in Goslar,
including "The Lucy poems". In the Autumn of 1799, Wordsworth and his sister returned to
England and visited the Hutchinson family at Sockburn. When Coleridge arrived back in
England he travelled to the North with their publisher Joseph Cottle to meet Wordsworth and
undertake a proposed tour of the Lake District. This was the immediate cause of the siblings
settling at Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, this time with another poet, Robert
Southey nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets".
[18]
Throughout this period many of Wordsworth's poems revolved around themes of death,
endurance, separation and grief.

Dove Cottage (Town End, Grasmere) – home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1799–
1808; home of Thomas De Quincey, 1809–1820

Marriage and children[edit]

In 1802 Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, paid the 4,000 pounds owed
to Wordsworth's father through Lowther's failure to pay his aide.[19] It was this repayment that
afforded Wordsworth the financial means to marry. On 4 October, following his visit with
Dorothy to France to arrange matters with Annette, Wordsworth married his childhood friend
Mary Hutchinson.[9] Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The
following year Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased her
and William:
  John Wordsworth (18 June 1803 – 1875). Married four times:

1. Isabella Curwen (d. 1848) had six children: Jane, Henry, William, John, Charles and
Edward.
2. Helen Ross (d. 1854). No children
3. Mary Ann Dolan (d. after 1858) had one daughter Dora (b. 1858).
4. Mary Gamble. No children

 Dora Wordsworth (16 August 1804 – 9 July 1847). Married Edward Quillinan in
1843.
 Thomas Wordsworth (15 June 1806 – 1 December 1812).
 Catherine Wordsworth (6 September 1808 – 4 June 1812).
 William "Willy" Wordsworth (12 May 1810 – 1883). Married Fanny Graham and had
four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald, Gordon

Autobiographical work and Poems in Two Volumes[edit]

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Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three
parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. In 1798–99 he started an autobiographical
poem, which he referred to as the "poem to Coleridge" and which he planned would serve as
an appendix to a larger work called The Recluse. In 1804 he began expanding this
autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix. He
completed this work, now generally referred to as the first version of The Prelude, in 1805,
but refused to publish such a personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse.
The death of his brother John, also in 1805, affected him strongly and may have influenced
his decisions about these works.

Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as articulated in The Prelude and in such shorter

works as "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" have been a source of critical
debate. It was long supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical
guidance, but more recently scholars have suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been
formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the mid-1790s. In particular, while
he was in revolutionary Paris in 1792 the 22-year-old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of
the mysterious traveler John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822),[20] who was nearing the end of
his thirty years of wandering, on foot, from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across
Africa and Europe, and up through the fledgling United States. By the time of their
association Stewart had published an ambitious work of original materialist philosophy
entitled The Apocalypse of Nature (London, 1791), to which many of Wordsworth's
philosophical sentiments may well be indebted.

In 1807 Wordsworth published Poems in Two Volumes, including "Ode: Intimations of

Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Up to this point Wordsworth was
known only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped that this new collection would cement his
reputation. Its reception was lukewarm, however.
Rydal Mount – home to Wordsworth 1813–1850. Hundreds of visitors came here to see him
over the years

In 1810, Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction,[9] and in
1812, his son Thomas died at the age of 6, six months after the death of 3-year-old Catherine.
The following year he received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland,
and the stipend of £400 a year made him financially secure. In 1813, he and his family,
including Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal
Water), where he spent the rest of his life.[9]

The Prospectus[edit]
In 1814 Wordsworth published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part work The
Recluse, even though he had not completed the first part or the third part, and never did. He
did, however, write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he laid out the structure
and intention of the whole work. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most
famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:

My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too,
Theme this but little heard of among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind.

Some modern critics[21] suggest that there was a decline in his work beginning around the mid-
1810s, perhaps because most of the concerns that characterised his early poems (loss, death,
endurance, separation and abandonment) has been resolved in his writings and his life. By
1820, he was enjoying considerable success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary
critical opinion of his earlier works.

Following the death of his friend the painter William Green in 1823, Wordsworth also
mended his relations with Coleridge.[22] The two were fully reconciled by 1828, when they
toured the Rhineland together.[9] Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered
her an invalid for the remainder of her life. Coleridge and Charles Lamb both died in 1834,
their loss being a difficult blow to Wordsworth. The following year saw the passing of James
Hogg. Despite the death of many contemporaries, the popularity of his poetry ensured a
steady stream of young friends and admirers to replace those he lost.
Laureateship and other honours[edit]
Wordsworth remained a formidable presence in his later years. In 1837, the Scottish poet and
playwright Joanna Baillie reflected on her long acquaintance with Wordsworth. "He looks
like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say. however he
does occasionally converse cheerfully & well; and when one knows how benevolent &
excellent he is, it disposes one to be very much pleased with him."[23]

In 1838, Wordsworth received an honorary doctorate in Civil Law from the University of
Durham and the following year he was awarded the same honorary degree by the University
of Oxford.[9] In 1842, the government awarded him a Civil List pension of £300 a year.

Following the death of Robert Southey in 1843 Wordsworth became Poet Laureate. He
initially refused the honour, saying that he was too old, but accepted when the Prime
Minister, Robert Peel, assured him that "you shall have nothing required of you".
Wordsworth thus became the only poet laureate to write no official verses. The sudden death
of his daughter Dora in 1847 at the age of only 42 was difficult for the aging poet to take and
in his depression, he completely gave up writing new material.

Death[edit]

Gravestone of William Wordsworth, Grasmere, Cumbria

William Wordsworth died at home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case of pleurisy on 23
April 1850,[24] and was buried at St Oswald's Church, Grasmere. His widow Mary published
his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his
death. Though it failed to arouse much interest at that time, it has since come to be widely
recognised as his masterpiece.

In popular culture[edit]
Wordsworth has appeared as a character in works of fiction, including:

 William Kinsolving – Mister Christian. 1996

 Val McDermid – The Grave Tattoo. 2006