The circumstances of his return and his subsequent behaviour raise doubts as to his declared wish to marry Annette but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England the next year. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. In November 1791, Wordsworth returned to France and took a walking tour of Europe that included the Alps and Italy. His youngest brother, Christopher, rose to be Master of Trinity College. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without distinction. In 1790, he visited Revolutionary France and supported the Republican movement. He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. Wordsworth began attending St John's College, Cambridge in 1787, maintained by relatives. It took him many years, and much writing, to recover from the death of his parents and his separation Although many aspects of his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of loneliness and anxiety. After their father's death, the Wordsworth children were left under the guardianship of their uncles. The Earl's successor, however, settled the claims with interest. The estate consisted of around £4500, most of it in claims upon the Earl, who thwarted these claims until his death in 1802. In 1783 his father, who was a lawyer and the solicitor for the Earl of Lonsdale (a man much despised in the area), died. She and William did not meet again for another nine years. After the death of their mother in 1778, their father sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year. April 7th 1741), William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in Cumberland?part of the scenic region in north-west England called the Lake District.
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth (b. Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The talk is at 2pm on Thursday November 14 at Rydal Mount and entry is free.William Wordsworth (Ap? April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. He had a further daughter with his third wife, Mary Dolan.” “He married into one of the notable Cumbrian families, Isabel Curwen of Workington Hall, and they had six children. “Not a writer, like his father, though he wrote many sermons! “John was a fascinating character,” said Mrs Strachan. Mrs Strachan has also researched the lives of the two children who died in childhood, Thomas, and Catherine who, she discovered, is highly likely to have been born with Down’s Syndrome. Her son, Professor John Strachan, the pro-vice-chancellor of Bath Spa university, and a specialist in Romanticism, is working on a book about the Wordsworth family and asked his mother if she would help research the lives of the children. His life has been researched by Muriel Strachan who will present the talk at Rydal Mount on November 14.Ī one-time nurse and midwife who took a degree in later life and graduated at the age of 60, Mrs Strachan developed a fascination with the Wordsworth family when she and her husband Robert, a retired doctor, moved to live in Cumbria. It is through John’s line that the current owners of Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s great-great-great-great grandsons, are descended. But John, born in 1803, lived to the age of 72, was married four times (after three of his wives died) and was a vicar, latterly at Brigham Church between Keswick and Cockermouth.
The world-renowned poet and his wife Mary had five children, two of whom died in infancy. A talk at Rydal Mount will open the pages on the life of William Wordsworth’s oldest child, John Wordsworth.