English Lake District & the borders tour: more Wordsworth sites; Beatrix Potter (3)

Famous Photo of Beatrix Potter at Hill Top House

Me in the same porch at Hill Top House

Dear friends,

Another day of remarkable site-seeing and experiences to report, this time with many more photos sent me by one of our Canterbury pilgrims. This day was another partly devoted to places Wordsworth lived in, was schooled, visited, made a garden, and partly devoted to Beatrix Potter. We visited castles and ruins. Everything was nearby everything else, including her house where we were staying, the (much enlarged), Lindeth Howe Country Hotel near Bowness, Lake Windermere:

Lindeth Howe Hotel, seen from the side

Bowness, Windermere, 6 in the morning

We started out early in the morning (after breakfast) by driving to and going into the fantasy-built Wray Castle, never a fortress, but made by a man imagining one: sort of something drawn from his movie-going, and impressive in thickness of stones, size and nowadays cared for by the National Trust, gardens, and places for tourists to picnic and play summer games:

A short ride and we were at Potter’s house and her lovely garden, a real place: here she did much of her artistic children’s books, and her serious botany drawings, and landscapes. One could see it was a summer home, open, surrounded by nature.

As you are going in

Potter’s odd piano

I had read much of Linda Lane’s book, went to a lecture by her on Potter, wrote a foremother poet blog for her, and of course seen the excellent biopic, Miss Potter with Renee Zellweger. The guides in the rooms (as in Dove Cottage) told us as much as they could, quickly. I felt it was a comfortable house.

Potter’s front room

There was a landscape by her on one wall, her children’s books, and I instance these found on the Internet as like what I saw:

“The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden — Beatrix Potter

New Sidmouth

“Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again — Beatrix Potter

Sidmouth beach, with memories of herself drawing

Not far from Hill Top is the town of Hawkshead where Wordsworth went to a famous once-respected boys’ school, where he lived with Ann Tyson, and which is today a place tourists come to hear a lecture about education in this building, and to the town for summer holidays, and shopping. Outside the school is a church (part of it converted):

There were two floors, one for the lower boys, and the other the boys about to go to college, two rooms for tutors. Here the huge one room downstairs from one angle:

A quick resume of an entertaining lecture: the school lasted from the later 16th to later 19th century; it went from 6 am to 5 pm, 6 days a week, with a 2 hour lunch in the center of the day. Compulsory church on Sunday; the 99-100 boys on 6 different levels recited in different parts of the room; during lunch they drank beer, participated in ritual terrorizing, torturing and murder of birds (cock-fighting). Birch was used, 10 and 12 strokes depending on the infraction; it was a noisy, busy, smokey place, with tallow candles it stunk (they went outside the building to relieve themselves). Originally funded by Edwin Sandys, there was a strong low church bias, and it was attached to St John’s Cambridge. We were shown the lists of headmasters (some remarkable scholars of their eras). It was finally closed for good in 1909. It was clear to me from what the lecturer was saying that there would have been no room for sensitivities; they were educating gentlemen trained in and by violence as well as social conformities and expectations of the upper class. As I left I spoke briefly to the lecturer and told him of my husband at a public school and how he was caned at his public school 5 times and in his forties still had welts on his hands. I was impressed positively by the lecturer suddenly dropping the comic wry stance and looking grave at the realities of such places

Following Peter, the group then walked about Hawkshead, saw Ann Tyson’s cottage, and then we all drove to Grassmere (in 2 mini-buses) for lunch and some brief walking about.

There were beautiful baskets of hanging flowers in both towns

I did not take many photos of walking about, Grasmere or Hawkshead, but today have some photos from my friend from yesterday afternoon at Keswick where we stopped for lunch the day before and wandered about town, and place them here:

Keswick restaurant

The Keswick church where I saw drawings and photos from the time mining was central to the village

The Slate museum we also saw yesterday which has replaced the mining trade once vital to the area

It was a very different world when mining and such schools and churches were central to the economic structure of the towns. Now it’s the town landscapes and lakes: tourism, agriculture and sheep (I’ll have photos of sheep next time):

Our next stop was the Armitt Museum, associated with Beatrix Potter because she donated much money and many of her books; it is now maintained as a research and reference library and museum for exhibits for local paintings (watercolors): that day there was much on (as in the other places women were emphasized) Anne Clough, Harriet Martineau, early suffragettes and an exhibit of watercolors by Kurt Schwitters (1847-1948) and William Heelis (1870-1940). They had a book (some well-chosen books to be bought) and tourist shop.

Graham Kilmer’s lecture was on the history of the library and cultures of the surrounding town in the 19th century and until today:

The history begins with the Armitt sisters who were learned women (Louisa a historian, polymath, musicologist). It was at first a circulating library. Wordsworth belonged; it attracted antiquarians, county families; Ruskin was a significant influence (he lived not far off), a superstar for his writing, art and art criticism and social and political activism on behalf of working people. Claudian glasses were not forgotten, and the picturesque part of the aesthetic. The library has sets of old volumes (e.g., Gentleman’s Magazine). Mr Kilmer took off the shelves a book on volcanic greenstone, what has been found from pre-history (weapons, pots, symbolic objects); another about a Roman fort’s excavation. He told the story of Ruskin’s conflict with Whistler as indicative of the culture. Photography became an important part of the collection starting in 1865 (a fundamental change), he said 17,000 unnamed plates. In 1997 it was re-organized into a reference library, with 2 part time librarians and a dozen volunteers. The library’s focus is the lakes, their geology, geography, history, local writers.

Rydal Mount house seen from the gardens

The piece de resistance of the day came nextL: we drove to Rydal Mount, which Wordsworth rented by 1809, and where he, Dorothy, Mary and their children and the friends lived and worked for the rest of their lives. The live-in caretaker, a curator, and now expert in Wordsworth took us round the beautiful gardens telling of the stages the garden went through. Wordsworth and his gardener (there was a photo of the man) aimed for a variety of perspectives, to have space to see the lake below, and that day the sun as streaming in. There is a mound, a greenhouse, a walk in the shrubberies.

In the house he told us of Wordsworth’s later life as reflected in the house, and that he felt the life lived in this house has been neglected in biographies. Rydal Mount was lived in for far far more time, where Wordsworth wrote original first drafts but also revised and revised.

We were permitted to go round the main rooms of the house where the Wordsworths lived: we saw beautifully kept dining room, library, drawing rooms, Wordsworth and Mary’s bedroom, Dora’s bedroom. Much of the furniture is suggestively left so you can imagine (if you think to) what the people were doing here and there; often reading, writing, meditating on memory. There was a very somber room at the top of the stairs where we saw a bed for a very sick person and all sorts of 19th century medical paraphernalia: this was to remember that in her last years Dorothy suffered from senile dementia and was taken care of (waited on hand and foot) by the Wordsworths and servants in that room. The top of the house or attic.

The meadows around Hawkshead close to where Wordsworth was located

We had dinner there as a group and one of us got up and read Wordsworth’s famous daffodil poem (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”). At the end of the two weeks some of the people said this evening was finest we had. For myself I don’t find this famous lyric what I value Wordsworth for, but rather his other early narratives about broken soldiers, people ejected from their houses, beggars; some of the sonnets; his meditative poetry, the visionary sequences in “Tintern Abbey,” the Prelude, and some of his later sterner verse.

I once wrote a paper on these ekphrastic stanzas, written after his brother John’s death in 1805, probably while Wordsworth lived in Rydal Mount brought to their present state:

George Beaumont (1753-1827), Peele Castle in a Storm

Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont

I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene’er I looked, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away.

How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;
No mood, which season takes away, or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.

Ah! then , if mine had been the Painter’s hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine
Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;—
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature’s breathing life.

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made:
And seen the soul of truth in every part,
A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been,—’tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.

Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea, and be what I have been:
The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.

Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,
If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,
This work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

O ’tis a passionate Work!—yet wise and well,
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves.

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.—
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

One should perhaps remember that none of this needs to be there; all of it takes people rescuing it, maintaining and preserving it. Not just money but organizations of people who understand what they are doing and why and are funded and backed up by laws and customs. So just about every place we were taken to as our goal was either a National Trust site or partly supported by them and other like local foundations. We were seeing history, or the remnant of what once was plucked out of its context and made a tourist experience. We were in places on the margins, places “left behind” the modern cities most of us (the customers of Road Scholar) live in, places with cultural status. One should think about why these places have this status, how they relate to the vast “bottom” part of our deeply unequal society, and are part of a fantasy life, pieces of a “shared imaginary repertoire of the dominant culture” (Rob Shields, Places on the Margin).

Shop either in Grasmere or Hawkshead and not far from the parking lot — to catch tourists

Another on the bus route — the sign in glittering gold and blue says Peter Rabbit and Friends and the window is filled with glowing figurines of the small animals in the tales

Ellen