Dorothy Wordsworth at Christmastide

I’ve found myself thinking about Dorothy Wordsworth over the Christmas period. Perhaps it’s because her birthday was Christmas Day itself, a strange day to have your birthday on in any case, but likely even more so when your parents have both died and you have been separated from your beloved brothers for so long, as Dorothy was in her youth. I thought, in the gaps between my children’s wild-eyed excitement and their spectacular if short-lived illnesses over the festive period, about what it might have been like to celebrate Christmas and New Year after Dorothy reunited with her brother William when she was in her early twenties.

It was perhaps the most perfect birthday present of all when William and Dorothy moved into Dove Cottage in Grasmere a few days before Christmas in 1799, with Dorothy about to turn 28. The chatty letter she and William sent to their mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written collectively directly over Christmas and Dorothy’s birthday, makes clear that they spent the whole of that time working enormously hard, and hardly seem to have registered that it was Christmas at all. Between the sewing in which Dorothy was ‘absolutely buried’, as her brother described it, and the painting, mending of doors, and dreaming about what their scrap of garden might look like come summer, the two had barely a moment to call their own. That they had walked dozens of miles from Yorkshire to Grasmere to reach their new home makes their domestic endeavours even more impressive, and the neglect of Christmas perhaps inevitable.

In subsequent years Dorothy seems to have found Christmas a trial on the whole, with opportunities for walks often curtailed by bad weather or ill health. The country was often closed in and friends were hard to reach as the twin tyrannies of ice and thaw wreaked havoc on the Lakeland roads. While there are no records of the Christmas the Wordsworths shared in 1800, that of 1801 - Dorothy’s thirtieth birthday - was described in her journal as ‘a very bad day’. The roads round about were too slippery to walk, a distressing letter arrived from Coleridge, and Dorothy, thoroughly fed up with it all, took herself to bed shortly after dinner.

I wonder, then, whether Christmas was often a difficult day for Dorothy; it is a difficult day for so many, for a whole range of reasons. Even though I love the excitement my children have for Christmas I was nonetheless glad this year to have them both in bed on Christmas morning, sleeping off the effects of the norovirus that struck on Christmas Eve. Their unusual sleepiness meant that instead of hours of sensory overload and inevitable screaming, I had a Christmas morning that involved a few minutes completely to myself. In that short interlude I sat outside in the eerily-mild air looking at the clouds passing overhead, thinking about nothing in particular. For once I had nothing to do for anyone else, and it was joyous. It would have been even better, though, to have joined Dorothy and William on their much more cheerful Boxing Day walk that thirtieth birthday year to Grasmere Lake, which was ‘clear as glass, reflecting all things’, and where nothing was to be heard except ‘the waters sounding’. That sounds to me like the perfect Christmas.