Dove Cottage (a house of William Wordsworth) in the Lake District - August 2000

• 24 Jul, 2010
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Dove Cottage is a house on the edge of Grasmere in the Lake District. It is best known as the home of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth from December 1799 to May 1808, where they spent over eight years of "plain living, but high thinking". During this period, William wrote much of the poetry for which he is remembered today, including his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", "Ode to Duty", "My Heart Leaps Up" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", together with parts of his autobiographical epic, The Prelude.
William married his wife Mary in 1802, and she and her sister joined the Wordsworths at Dove Cottage. The family quickly expanded, with the arrival of three children in four years, and the Wordsworths left Dove Cottage in 1808 to seek larger lodgings. The cottage was then occupied by Thomas de Quincey for a number of years, before being let to a succession of tenants.
The cottage was acquired by the Wordsworth Trust in 1890 and opened to the public in 1891. The house is a Grade 1 listed building, and remains largely unchanged from Wordsworth's day. It receives approximately 70,000 visitors a year.