‘Schemes of Retirement’: William Wordsworth and Building in the Lakes

by Charity Ford

I had been off an airplane for four days and an intern at Wordsworth Grasmere for only two when Jeff Cowton, Principal Curator and Head of Learning at the Wordsworth Trust, showed me a folder of 43 letters and manuscripts donated by the Royal Society’s Head of Library and Information Services and former employee of the Wordsworth Trust, Keith Moore. Jeff asked if I might sift through the documents, posted to and from Grasmere from 1837 to the 1880s, for anything of interest to the Trust. I was still jet-lagged and woefully unadjusted, so I suspected that the project was a nice bit of cataloguing for me to do while I moored myself. I did catalogue the letters (1) —but not until that afternoon’s foray through Victorian handwriting turned into a 3 ½-month hunt through family trees, newspaper clippings, book scans, transcriptions, biographies, the Jerwood Centre’s repositories, and St. Oswald’s churchyard for a better understanding of the people whose writings I read and reread. I would like to introduce you now to the family whose correspondence I read and how their connection to Wordsworth gave me a new understanding of the poet’s relationship with the landscape.

Wordsworth and the Fletchers’ Schemes of Retirement
The letters concerned the Fletcher family, whose matriarch, Eliza Dawson Fletcher, was a good friend of William Wordsworth in his later years. Mrs. Fletcher began looking for a house in the Lake District as early as 1835 and called upon Wordsworth to aid her in her search (2). He fulfilled his duty four years later when he found and arranged her purchase of a farm in Easedale (nearly a mile north of Grasmere) called Lancrigg (see image below). Mrs. Fletcher bought it, and after a year of preparing the property for their inhabitance, she and her daughter Mary moved in during the spring of 1841. Lancrigg was originally intended, as Mrs. Fletcher wrote in her autobiography, “as a summer refreshment,” but by 1843 their residence was permanent (3).

The farmhouse at Lancrigg and its surrounding acreage underwent several “improvements” during the Fletchers’ occupancy, including chimneys reconstructed after the ideal described by Wordsworth in his Guide to the Lakes: a “low square … surmounted by a tall cylinder, giving to the cottage chimney the most beautiful shape in which it is ever seen” (4). The Fletchers’ work upon their property interested Wordsworth greatly, who occasionally potters around Fletcher family stories solemnly planting holly berries on Lancrigg’s grounds and commenting on the property’s fine aesthetic (5) . Meanwhile, more of Mrs. Fletcher’s brood came flocking to the Lakes. In 1844, Mrs. Fletcher’s daughter Margaret and her husband Dr. John Davy purchased land near Ambleside. There they built an “excellent house” called Lesketh How, the opposite border to Lancrigg for Mrs. Fletcher’s “little family colony” (6). Traffic between Lesketh How and Lancrigg was regular, and each house attracted a growing circle of neighbors and friends, such as Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Arnolds of Fox How, and, of course, the Wordsworths.

The descent of the Fletchers and their well-to-do circle into Grasmere vale coincided with, as Wordsworth saw it, the more threatening exodus of day-trippers to the Lakes via the railway. When a railway line connecting Oxenholme, Kendal, and Windermere was proposed in 1844, the poet was spurred into what I imagine was a frenzy of iambs and righteous anger. Wordsworth’s resulting sonnet “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway” was published by the Morning Post on 16 October 1844 and quickly garnered backlash: a parody poem appeared in the Liverpool Mercury in November 1844 accusing Wordsworth of selfish and “class-bred thoughts,” (7) Hartley Coleridge faulted him for his stubbornness in a letter to the Kendal Mercury (8), and even the poet’s family doctor—Dr. John Davy of the newly established Lesketh How—voiced a belief in Wordsworth’s narrow-mindedness in the Westmorland Gazette (9). Wordsworth’s proceeding publications on the subject (two letters to the editor of the Morning Post and a pamphlet) indicate that he had more than a sonnet’s worth of protestations against rail development, but they also indicate the need he had to justify his position.

The criticism disturbed him. His hurt is evident in a conversation recorded by Mary Fletcher from a visit she and her mother paid Wordsworth that year. He lamented that the detractors of his “unfortunate sonnet,” as he called it, should “actually accuse me of desiring to interfere with the innocent enjoyments of the poor.” These claims are not unfounded, for although Wordsworth opens the sonnet by accusing rail development of threatening “rash assault” against the entire nation, this generality quickly snaps shut when Wordsworth moves from all “nook[s] of English ground” to the land where “Schemes of retirement sown / In youth” will be spoiled if cut up by the railway (lines 1–2). The greatest threat a line to Windermere poses, he seems to imply, is that it will upset the peace of the men and women privileged with lakeside holiday or retirement homes. His ensuing explanation to Mrs. and Miss Fletcher that the Lakes’ scenery would be lost on “the poor, as a class… while to the educated classes, to whom such scenes as these give enjoyments of the purest kind, the effect would almost be destroyed,” hardly disproves his critics’ allegations of elitism. But as Lancrigg was the perfect prototype for a “nook of English ground” primed for “schemes of retirement,” Wordsworth showed tact, at least, in his choice of audience. One can imagine that as Wordsworth bemoaned the sonnet’s controversy, the Fletchers nodded and consoled in ready sympathy, as theirs was the side his poem took.

Many of Wordsworth’s friends were people who retired, permanently or seasonally, to the Lakes: the arctic explorer Sir John Richardson, the brothers Dr. John and Sir Humphry Davy, Harriet Martineau, and Dr. Thomas Arnold and his family (among whom was his son Matthew, the poet). They and other members of polite society who escaped to the Lake District either for the summer or the rest of their lives comprised what came to be known as “the intrusion,” an event which the Westmorland Gazette claimed in 1912 (10) began with Mrs. Fletcher’s purchase of Lancrigg (11). Mrs. Fletcher acted as a beacon, the Gazette explains, to other “cultured and wealthy people” coming in self-exile to Grasmere. Even when the marriage of her daughter Mary to Sir John Richardson in 1847 split Mrs. Fletcher’s time between the Lakes and London, she insisted that “neither Bishop nor Archbishop cd now tempt me to let our Bonny Bigging” (12) as she termed Lancrigg, and the influence of the Fletchers on Grasmere vale endured well into the 20th century (13). Wordsworth seemed to believe the peace of these people needed saving. Loyalty to the friends whose nooks of ground he defended likely fanned his indignation, but Wordsworth’s longtime personal interest in finding and keeping a nook of his own.

Wordsworth’s Schemes of Retirement
One avenue taken during my research for the letters project was Wordsworth’s increasing conservatism. It’s no wonder many were put out by Wordsworth’s thoughtlessness toward the poor in his “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway,” as the man who once advocated for “men who do not wear fine cloaths” (14) now turned his sympathy to men who did. Homebuilding seems a strange thing, too, for Wordsworth to support when he closes his Guide to the Lakes by suggesting the Lakes become “a sort of national property” as a safeguard against “wealthy purchasers, who … erect new mansions out of the ruins of ancient cottages” who “cannot be expected to leave things to themselves” (15) The question of how Wordsworth let himself lend his poetry to the cause of “the intrusion,” though, is less puzzling when his long-time interest and convictions about building in the Lakes are aired out.

Wordsworth regularly displayed a sensitivity to an equilibrium between mankind and its relationship to wilderness. At 30, he insisted through his poem “Michael” that some uses of land were worthier than others. His anxieties about the morals of land use sometimes led his 1801 letter to the parliamentarian Charles James Fox, sent with a second edition of Lyrical Ballads, occasionally into religious rhetoric: “the most sacred of all property is the property of the poor” (16) The narrative in “Michael” is a succession of losses—Michael’s son never returns, Michael dies, his sheepfold is left in ruins, his wife dies—but to Wordsworth, the loss of Michael’s property to tasteless cultivation is the poem’s final, climactic death knell. Wordsworth chooses to close the work with the lines

The Cottage which was named The Evening Star
Is gone—the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood; great changes have been wrought
In all the neighbourhood. (lines 478–81).

The great tragedy is not that the land was no longer untouched by man, as Michael alone had a cottage and unfinished sheepfold to his name, but that it was developed without taste or heart.

A decade after the publication of “Michael,” Wordsworth virtually exhausted his opinions on homebuilding in the Lakes in the prose of Select Views (later expanded to his Guide to the Lakes). Select Views, like “Michael,” does not condemn the ownership of property in the Lake District, but instead it carefully outlines how to discerningly develop the land. If cottages are to be built, ensure they look organic, as if “ris[ing], by instinct of their own, out of native rock” (17) And if a house is to be large, let it be “hidden, as to admit of its being gently incorporated into the scene of nature” (18). Wordsworth feels strongly that a natural aesthetic is preferable to gaudy architectural flourishes. Interestingly, though, he pens these lines not in quaint little Dove Cottage but in the larger and more conspicuous Allan Bank. He seems to have held to his homebuilding ideas in theory, as his instructions to Mrs. Fletcher about Lancrigg prove, but his practical approach to building, like scribbling condemnations against arrant houses while living in one, is more complicated.

In November 1799, Wordsworth wrote to his sister Dorothy while passing through the Lakes with Coleridge that “you will think my plan a mad one, but I have thought of building a house here by the Lake side” (19). This house, like the one he came near building in 1805, (20) came to nothing. However, when the Wordsworth’s removed from the Old Rectory in 1813, they settled with sad irony to Rydal Mount, one of the “fine houses” near “Rydale head” Dorothy once wished she could “juggle away” (21) Wordsworth’s most poignant break from ideals of untouched Nature and pastoral cottages occurred when he faced eviction from Rydal Mount in 1826. Lady le Fleming of Rydal Hall notified the poet that she planned for her aunt to take up Rydal Mount, necessitating the Wordsworths’ removal (22). Wordsworth turned again to his old aspiration to build, purchased a nearby piece of land called the Rash (now Dora’s Field), and called upon the architect George Webster to draw up plans. The plans, with which Wordsworth appears heavily involved, (23) are not grandiose, but neither are they simple or rustic (see below).

Lady le Fleming’s aunt never came and the crisis passed, but Wordsworth revisited these plans when he considered moving Isabella Fenwick, his friend and amanuensis, into a cottage built upon the Rash, bringing her nearer Rydal Mount. Fenwick wanted to employ Anthony Salvin as architect, who typically worked in the restoration of mansions and castles. No schemes exist, as Lady le Fleming’s legal threats barred any progress, but it’s difficult to imagine Salvin’s designs would have conformed to Wordsworth’s old ideas of humble cottages springing from the earth. It’s easy to imagine, though, that this tentative building project, discussed from 1843 to 1844, contributed to Wordsworth’s vendetta against the Kendal and Windermere railway proposal.

Reading through the Fletcher letters overarched and underscored my time at Wordsworth Grasmere. The research nosed its way into everything, accentuating touches of the surrounding landscape. I recognized names in the churchyard, named and dated village buildings on my way to the shop, kept on the lookout for Wordsworthian chimneys, and sat in the gardens of Lancrigg (now a hotel) thinking I must be the first in generations to come to the house for the Fletchers. It also complicated the linearity of Wordsworth’s conservative decline, as he was never wholly opposed to developing land or living comfortably, only particular about how to do it. His compassion for people like the Fletchers, who settled in homes they built or renovated, likely stemmed from his desire, held in youth and every age beyond, for a house built “there by the Lake side.”

 

 

[1] See the following link for their record in the Wordsworth Trust’s database: https://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/wtweb/home.asp?page=FA%20item%20details&mwsquery=%20(%20(%20({Combined%20word%20search}%20=%20{fletcher})%20)%20)%20&id=80751 [2] Angus Taylor, “The Lowly Dwelling of William Wordsworth, Esq^re,” The Georgian Group Journal, vol. 7 (1997): 53. [3 Eliza Fletcher, Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher with Letters and Other Family Memorials (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1875), 242. [4] William Wordsworth, Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London: R. Ackermann, 1810), 18. [5] Lady Mary Richardson, quoted in Frederika Beatty, Wordsworth of Rydal Mount: An Account of the Poet and His Friends in the Last Decade (New York: Bookman Associates, 1964), 18–19, 23–25. [6] Fletcher, Autobiography, 221. [7] HNRCH, “Another Sonnet on the Same Subject,” Liverpool Mercury, 22 November 1844, 7. [8] Hartley Coleridge, “WINDERMERE RAILWAY, To the Editor of the Kendal Mercury,” Kendal Mercury, 23 November 1844, 3. [9] John Davy, “Kendal and Windermere Railway. To the Editor of the Morning Post,” Westmorland Gazette, 21 December 2024, 3. [10] William Fuller, “The ‘Intrusion,’” Westmorland Gazette, 1912. [11] William Wordsworth to John Kenyon, 23 September 1833, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 5: The Later Years: Part II: 1829 – 1834 (Second Revised Edition), ed. Ernest De Selincourt and Alan G. Hill (Oxford UP, 1979), 640. Even within the Fletchers’ circle of friends, they were not the first to make a home for themselves in self-exile to the Lake District. As Wordsworth wrote, “Dr. Arnold, Master of Rugby School, is building a House for himself and his family to retire to, during the Summer and Winter Vacations; so that it will not be wanted by the owner more than 10 weeks in the year…” [12] Eliza Fletcher to Lady Mary Richardson, 20 July 1849. [13] See Lake Country Portraits (1967), Grasmere Parish Magazine (July 1947), Westmorland Gazette (1912), Henry M. Fletcher to Rev. E. Jeffries (23 March 1880) [14] William Wordsworth to Charles James Fox, 14 January 1801, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 1: The Early Years: 1787–1805, ed. Ernest De Selincourt and Chester L. Shaver (Oxford UP, 1967), 315. [15] William Wordsworth, “A Guide through the District of the Lakes in The North of England,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 2, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford UP, 1974), 224–25. [16] William Wordsworth to Charles James Fox, Letters, 315. [17] Wordsworth, “Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (1810),” Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, ed. Nicholas Mason, Paul Westover, Shannon Stimpson, Billy M. Hall, Jarom McDonald (Boulder: University of Colorado Boulder, 2020), 18. [18] Ibid, 25. [19] William Wordsworth to Dorothy Wordsworth, 8 November 1799, Letters, 272. [20] Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life (New York: Viking, 2000), 245. [21] Dorothy Wordsworth, 14 May 1800, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Jounrals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford UP, 2002), 1. [22] Barker, Wordsworth, 750. [23] William Wordsworth to George Webster, 18 February 1826, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 8: A Supplement of New Letters (Revised Edition), ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford UP, 1993), 191–92. Wordsworth writes that he wishes Webster to “come over to Rydal for the benefit of your Plans and judgment in respect to the House I design building there.” Whether Wordsworth’s “designs” imply a general idea to build or specific architectural designs is unclear, but either way it is clear Wordsworth’s interest in the house is active and involved.

The post ‘Schemes of Retirement’: William Wordsworth and Building in the Lakes appeared first on Wordsworth Grasmere.