Wordsworth, William (1770–1850, age 55): DW’s older brother, with whom she had shared a home since 1795. In his mid-fifties, WW’s literary reputation and audience were still steadily expanding, and he continued to write new poems and rework old ones, including the revisions to The Excursion chronicled in Notebook 1.

Although chronic eye pain often made it difficult for him to read and DW remarked in 1825 that he was “much thinner than he used to be, and this makes him look old,” the poet generally remained as hale and hearty as his sister.

Beyond his literary commitments, WW devoted considerable energy during this period to his duties as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland and his extensive engagement with local and national politics.

Wordsworth, John (1803–75, age 22): The eldest child of WW and MW who, while less spirited than his younger siblings and less brilliant than his childhood companions Hartley and Sara Coleridge, was a dutiful son and kindhearted brother and nephew. Any expectations that he would follow his father’s and uncle Christopher’s path to Cambridge were foiled by John’s struggles with mathematics, a subject emphasized more heavily there than at other universities. Accordingly, in 1823, WW used family connections to secure his son’s admission to New College, Oxford.

While John was still enrolled, his parents kept him at home for much of 1825 owing to a reported typhus outbreak at Oxford. This left him largely carefree, and DW’s journal suggests he spent much of his time both with old friends and with Fanny Barlow, a pretty young heiress who arrived in the area in early 1825.

Wordsworth, Dora (1804–47, age 21): WW and MW’s second child and only surviving daughter, whom Hartley Coleridge described in 1824 as “a very pleasing girl—simple and affectionate; uniting her Aunt Sarah’s shrewdness to her mother’s gentleness.”

After spending part of 1823–24 working in Ambleside as a teacher at the Dowlings’ school, Dora moved back to RM, where, when healthy, she helped her mother and aunts with household chores and her father compose letters and copy poems. For much of the decade covered by the RJ, her chronic illnesses dominated the family’s domestic routines and travel schedules. In the summer of 1825, for instance, the Wordsworths spent two months at a rental home at Kents Bank on Morecambe Bay largely for her health. In the short term, the rest and sea air appear to have helped, as during this vacation a revitalized Dora formed the most intense attachment of her young life with the family’s new friend Jane Jewsbury.

And, still rejuvenated after returning to RM, she caught the eye of Lt. Tom Robinson, a distant cousin spending his shore leave at his brother’s home in Ambleside. In general, DW remained characteristically discrete about this budding relationship, but, if there is any prevailing theme to the final segment of Notebook 1, it is how inseparable Dora and Tom became throughout the fall of 1825.

Wordsworth, Willy (1810–83, age 15): WW and MW’s youngest child, who, while decidedly unbookish in his mid-teens, had become an avid sportsman and a jovial companion. Still haunted by the 1812 deaths of their third and fourth children, his parents tended to be overprotective with Willy, which resulted in his being largely educated at home rather than exposed to contagion at a boarding school. In late 1823 DW reported that her then-13-year-old nephew “continues stout and well, and improves as much in scholarship as can be expected . . . of one so lively and volatile as he is.”

By May 1825, however, she worried about his anxious mother’s lingering inclination to clip his wings, writing, “Willy [is] strong and lively – but poor thing! his mother is often haunted by inward fears.”

Hutchinson, Sara (1775–1835, age 50): A younger sister of MW who, having never married, spent much of her adult life with the Wordsworths. In middle age she had lost none of the brilliance and wit that had once captivated Coleridge; and, while she was never thought a great beauty, her sister MW opined in September 1824 that she was “looking better than I have seen her for many years.”

Like her friend and housemate, SH was heavily involved in raising her nieces and nephews both at RM and beyond. While her permanent residence was in Rydal, she was quick to go where needed, which led to her spending a two-and-a-half-year stretch of the mid-1820s (February 1823–August 1825) away from home. At the outset of Notebook 1, she was in Devon helping to nurse her dying cousin Tom Monkhouse. After his passing in February 1825, she spent the next six months in the Midlands comforting the deceased’s siblings, John Monkhouse and Mary Hutchinson, and helping her brother Tom’s young family move from Hindwell, their longtime farm home in eastern Wales, to Brinsop Court, their new farmhouse across the border in Herefordshire.

Barber, Samuel (1771–1832, age 54): A Grasmere bachelor whose 1832 obituary would describe him as “a gentleman of rather eccentric habits and whose residence was well known to the numerous visitors of the English lakes, as one of the most beautiful cottages in the lake districts.”

Mr. Barber’s father, a clothier of Wrexham, Wales, died when he was just two, and four years later his mother, Penelope (née Jones, d. 1813), married Charles Woollam, a merchant from nearby Chester who apparently raised his step-sons—Samuel and his younger brother, Watkin Robert—as his own, advertising in early 1796 that he had “taken his kinsman, Samuel Barber, into partnership” in his mercery and drapery business.

After Woollam’s passing in late 1797, Penelope stepped in as her son’s partner, and, between their thriving mercantile concerns and a silk-throwing manufactory Woollam had started in St. Albans, they became sufficiently wealthy that in his thirties Mr. Barber could exchange the life of a provincial tradesman for that of a London and Paris dandy.

For unknown reasons, though, he decided in 1808 to forsake the buzz of the metropolis for the quiet of the Lakes, buying Gell’s Cottage in Grasmere from its namesake and commencing what became a never-ending series of expansions and improvements to the home.

Over the ensuing decades, this neighbor, whom DW described in 1821 as “the gayest Bachelor you ever saw,” became an intimate friend of the family at RM and a beloved, if eccentric, uncle figure for the children of WW and MW.

Barlow, Frances (née Bayley, 1784–1863, age 41) and Fanny (1807–52, age 18):  A well-to-do widow and her teenaged daughter who entered the Wordsworths’ social world soon after leasing The Wood in Troutbeck in early 1825. Mrs. Barlow hailed from a wealthy Presbyterian family from Manchester that made its fortune in cotton, and her inheritance made her a suitable match for John Barlow, heir to Middlethorpe Hall in Yorkshire. When he died six years after their 1807 marriage, she and her only child, Fanny, were forced to vacate Middlethorpe; but after the last male heir died in early 1824, Fanny suddenly stood to inherit the estate upon her twenty-first birthday.

Upon the Barlows’ arrival in Troutbeck, the Wordsworths were quick to befriend both mother and daughter, even inviting them to join them on holiday at Kents Bank in the summer of 1825. Afterwards, Dora mused, “I do like Miss Barlow but the ‘attachment’ is at its height – and it will never go beyond liking I fear.”

Her brother John, on the other hand, was positively smitten with the 17-year-old heiress, with SH marveling at how her normally reserved nephew sprang to life whenever Miss Barlow was present. “I never saw anyone so changed as he,” she quipped, positing that “no Lark can be more lively & agreeable.”

Campbell, Lt.-Col. Archibald (1776–1840, age 49) and Anne (née Blachford, 1786–1827, age 39): A widely respected couple—he a Scottish veteran of the Peninsular Wars and she a gentleman’s daughter from the Isle of Wight—who, three years after their 1817 marriage, took the lease of Allan Bank in Grasmere.

Their entry into local society was gradual, as a year after their arrival MW still vaguely described them as “a large Scotch family of Consideration, with Carriages, etc.”

By 1825, however, they and the Wordsworths had grown sufficiently friendly that, upon learning the Campbells would be leaving Grasmere by year’s end for a posting in India, the entire family at RM was, according to Dora, “grieved to lose” these “excellent neighbours.”

Mrs. Campbell would die at sea in March 1827 aboard a ship returning from India, and, after retiring to his native Isle of Mull, the colonel kept up an occasional correspondence with the Wordsworths until his passing in 1840.

Carr, Thomas (1795–1856, age 30) and Ann (née Dowling, 1784–1837, age 41): A pair of Ambleside professionals, both associates of the Wordsworths, who married in February 1824. Partly because she was eleven years his senior, their common friends were still adjusting to the idea of their union a year later, as suggested by Sara Coleridge’s tartly remarking in April 1825 that the Carrs “are both estimable persons, when viewed separately, but seen as man & wife they are absurd enough.”

The former Miss Dowling became acquainted with WW in 1812 while working as a governess in the household of Lord Galway, but her friendship with the poet’s family dated to 1818, when she moved to Ambleside to take over the girls’ school that Dora attended.

SH, for one, was immediately impressed, calling her “a most admirable woman & very accomplished in the solid sense of the word.”

DW concurred, observing in October 1818 that Dora seemed “as happy as possible” with her new teacher and that WW and MW had “every reason to be satisfied with the improvement she is making.”

Miss Dowling’s future husband came to Ambleside two years later, arriving as a newly credentialed apothecary from Lancaster who would fill the void left by the passing of Richard Scambler. In relatively short order, Mr. Carr became an indispensable medical resource for local families like the Wordsworths, as evidenced by his regular appearances throughout the RJ.

Coleridge, Hartley (1796–1849, age 29, DNB): The brilliant but erratic eldest child of Samuel Taylor and Sarah Coleridge who, after being a regular visitor to RM during his adolescence, still occasionally turned to DW and WW for assistance in his late twenties. Upon graduating from Merton College, Oxford, in 1818, Hartley secured a prestigious fellowship at Oriel College, only to be promptly expelled for insolence and insobriety. After two unfruitful years of trying to support himself writing for London periodicals, he grew resigned to “not expecting much happiness” in life and, heeding his father’s advice, accepted a teaching job at his old school in Ambleside.

Seeing him for the first time in years, a startled DW opined in 1822 that he was “the oddest looking creature you ever saw—not taller than Mr de Quincey—with a beard as black as a raven.”

Hartley ultimately spent five unfulfilling years at the school, frequently snubbing invitations from the Wordsworths while lamenting being stuck in a place where “I have hardly an acquaintance of my own sex between 15 and 40.”

Coleridge, Sarah (née Fricker, 1770–1845, age 55) and Sara (1802–52, age 23, DNB): The estranged wife of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and her only daughter. Since the early 1800s the Coleridges had lived at Greta Hall in Keswick with the family of Mrs. Coleridge’s sister, Edith Southey. In her early twenties, the younger Sara was already establishing a reputation for literary genius, publishing two acclaimed translations—the first of a history of Paraguay (1822) and the second of the adventures of Chevalier Bayard of France (1825)—with the leading publisher John Murray by her twenty-third birthday.

During the year covered by Notebook 1, Mrs. Coleridge saw little of her husband or two sons but enjoyed an affectionate relationship with the Southeys and an increasingly warm relationship with the Wordsworths. After the Coleridges spent a fortnight at RM in April 1825, DW reflected, “Adversity is the best school, I believe, for the best of us; and poor Mrs Coleridge has had enough of it, in the shape of humiliation and disappointed hopes concerning the talents of her Sons.” And of the daughter, she wrote, “Dear Sara is a sweet creature, so thoughtful and gentle, patient and persevering—and in conversation not disputatious as she used to be.”

Cookson, Thomas (1771–1833, age 54) and Elizabeth (née Mitford, 1775–1868, age 50): Close friends of the Wordsworths who raised their large Unitarian family in Staveley, a rapidly growing industrial area 5 miles northwest of Kendal. Unrelated to the Cooksons of the Wordsworths’ maternal line, the “Kendal Cooksons” were manufacturers of cotton and woolen goods and the bobbins used in mechanical looms. Both parents came from humble roots, as Thomas’s father was a Kendal dyer and Elizabeth’s ran a carpentry shop on Archer St. in London. How they met is unclear, but, after marrying in Westminster in 1798, they settled in Kendal in time for the birth of their first child, Elizabeth (1799–1891, age 26), in late 1799. A few years thereafter they met the Wordsworths through SH, who apparently had been a childhood friend or one of both of them in Kendal.

By 1810 the families had grown intimate enough to be regular guests at one another’s homes, and DW became especially close to Mrs. Cookson and several of their eleven children. In 1825 DW made at least two visits to Kendal to help nurse their chronically ill daughter Elizabeth, and three other Cookson children appear by name in Notebook 1: their second son, James (b. 1803, age 22), who helped run the family mill and whom DW accompanied on various errands from 18–22 June 1825; their third son, John (1804–57, age 21), who visited Rydal in early October 1825 and drove DW home from Kendal later that month; and their youngest son, Edwin (b. 1816, age 9), who gleefully accompanied DW back to RM in mid-February 1825.

Dawson, Ann (b. 1800?, age 25?): A residential housemaid of the Wordsworths from 1823–42. Census records suggest she was born near the start of the century at Wythburn, a village at the foot of Thirlmere between Grasmere and Keswick.

Soon after Ann came to RM, DW remarked that she was “admired not for her beauty but for her sensible countenance and respectable appearance.”

Like most domestics at RM, she appears only fleetingly in family records, but letters show her accompanying the Wordsworths on their summer holiday to Kents Bank and the RJ registers serious concerns about her health in the autumn of 1825.

De Quincey, Thomas (1785–1859, age 40, DNB) and Margaret (née Simpson, 1796–1837, age 29): The acclaimed essayist, lapsed Wordsworthian, and notorious “opium eater” and the daughter of a Rydal farmer he had married after she became pregnant in 1817. While the Wordsworths were significantly closer to Thomas, they had known his wife longer, with DW predicting in the GJ that “Little Peggy Simpson” would grow up to look as much like her mother “as any rose in her garden is like that Rose that grew there years before.”

Fifteen years on, DW was considerably less flattering, lamenting that her brilliant young friend De Quincey had fallen prey to the “witcheries” of “Miss Sympson, who to all other judgments appeared to be a stupid, heavy girl, and was reckoned a Dunce at Grasmere School.”

The De Quinceys spent their first three years of married life at Dove Cottage before their growing family occasioned their move to Fox Ghyll, the Loughrigg home that DW regularly reports visiting in Notebook 1, especially in the weeks after Margaret bore the couple’s fifth child in late 1824. In March 1825, however, Fox Ghyll was sold to the Wordsworths’ friend Letitia Luff, and the De Quinceys were promptly evicted. With her husband then being in London trying to stave off creditors with his pen, Margaret had no recourse but to take temporary refuge with her five children at The Nab, her parents’ farmhouse in Rydal.

Dowling, Mary (1791–1830, age 34), Jane (1795–1851, age 30), and Eliza (1797–1870, age 28): A trio of unmarried younger sisters of Ann Dowling Carr who moved to Ambleside in the early 1820s to teach at her school and then continued to run it after her 1824 marriage.

Their father, Vincent (1756–1825), was an Irish journalist and entrepreneur who met his English wife, Elizabeth (née Andrews, 1758–1836), while working as a newspaper correspondent in London in the early 1780s. In 1789 the couple moved to Dublin, where Vincent wrote for various publications, opened a circulating library, and sold patent medicines. By 1805 they returned to London, and the younger Dowling siblings came of age in Kentish Town, a suburb to the northwest of the city. While the sisters all became schoolteachers, two of their three brothers, Vincent George (1785–1852, DNB) and Alfred Septimus (1805–68, DNB), followed in their father’s footsteps as journalists and the third, James (1787–1844, DNB), became a successful attorney and, in 1837, Chief Justice of the British court in Australia.

The Wordsworths befriended all four sisters, and, when their parents visited from London in 1823, DW gave them a guided tour of the region.

Although it goes unnoticed in the RJ, the Dowlings spent much of the year covered by Notebook 1 mourning their father’s passing in early April 1825. Sara Coleridge expressed particular concern about the “health and spirits” of the youngest, Eliza, who, besides being “sadly wasted by the wear & tear of her wearisome avocations,” seemed especially “out of sorts” in the wake of her father’s death.

Elliott, John (1763?–1835, age 62?) and Anna Maria (née Maltby, 1771–1855, age 54): A well-connected couple from the South East of England whose two-year stint at Ivy Cottage (1823–24) led to a lasting friendship with the Wordsworths.

The son of Rear Admiral George Elliott of Copford, Essex, Mr. Elliott forged a distinguished military career himself, steadily advancing from ensign in 1782 to lieutenant colonel in 1799.

A year after this final promotion, he married Anna Maria Maltby, the eldest surviving daughter of a wealthy merchant of Norwich. In 1804, however, their fortunes abruptly turned, when he was court-martialed for having knowingly sold the army horses that were unfit for action, found guilty, and stripped of his rank and commission.

Where the Elliotts took refuge in the wake of this calamity is unclear, but there is no indication that any reputational stain followed them north in the 1820s. If anything, their new neighbors initially feared this fashionable and childless couple would find Westmorland life decidedly provincial, with their housekeeper at Ivy Cottage fretting that she would “have some trouble with the new Tenants” and MW spreading advance reports that Mrs. Elliott was “a fine stately woman” who “expected to find in the Cottage the accommodations of a stately Mansion.”

Such anxieties were soon dispelled, however, by the new arrivals’ generosity and conviviality, and the Wordsworths quickly came to rely on both their company and newspaper subscriptions. Just days before the start of Notebook 1, the Elliotts vacated Ivy Cottage and took temporary accommodations in Ambleside. Thereafter they spent much of 1825 in Devonshire with friends before returning to the area that autumn.

Harden, John (1772–1847, age 53) and Janet “Jessy” (née Allan, 1776–1837, age 49): An Irish gentleman and accomplished landscape painter who in 1803, two years after the passing of his first wife, married Jessy Allan, the daughter of a prominent Edinburgh banker and the proprietor of the Caledonian Mercury. A year later, the couple took the lease on Brathay Hall, the spacious home southwest of Ambleside where they would spend the next three decades.

Although the Hardens met the Wordsworths soon after moving to the Lakes, the households began regularly socializing only after their teenaged children grew close in the early 1820s.

Notebook 1 records numerous interactions between the families of Brathay and RM, but the only Harden child mentioned by name is their eldest daughter Jane Sophia (1807–76, age 18), a celebrated beauty who, according to her friend Dora, was rumored to have briefly been “Lovers” with the Marshalls’ eldest son, William, in late 1824.

Harrison, Benson (1786–1863, age 39) and Dorothy (née Wordsworth, 1800–90, age 25): An iron magnate from Ulverston and the second cousin of WW and DW he married in 1823. Although raised 30 miles away in Whitehaven, “Cousin Dorothy” (as she is often identified in the RJ) became close to her Rydal relations while spending nearly a year at RM in 1813–14. Dubbed “Middle Dorothy” or “Middle Dolly” at the time to avoid confusion, she received lessons from SH and DW and became an older sister figure for the Wordsworths’ three children.

A decade later, when she was 22, the 36-year-old widower Benson Harrison caught sight of her in an Ulverston shop and was “so enchanted” that he was certain she would “haunt his memory till he made her his bride.”

Their ensuing marriage was by all indications a happy one, as both were famously good-tempered and they lived comfortably on his income as heir to one of Britain’s oldest and largest iron foundries.

When DW visited their Ulverston home, The Lund, in July 1825 (as recorded in Notebook 1), the Harrisons’ household included his widowed mother, a young daughter from his first marriage, and a one-year-old son from their union. Only weeks after DW’s departure, Cousin Dorothy gave birth to twins, only one of whom survived.

Honeyman, Mary (1775–1851, age 50): An acquaintance from Penrith who was possibly a childhood friend of the Hutchinson sisters. Miss Honeyman’s father, John (1745–83), came from a long line of Church of Scotland ministers from Kinneff, Aberdeenshire, and he spent eleven years as Penrith’s Presbyterian minister before his untimely death in 1783.

Her mother, Jane (née Richardson, 1747–86), died three years later, and there is no record of where or with whom she lived from 1786 until 1806, when tax records list her as a Penrith mantua maker keeping an apprentice. It was likely in this role that Sally Green—one of the family of Grasmere orphans whom the community rallied behind in 1808—went to live with Miss Honeyman in 1810.

Fifteen years later, Miss Honeyman would spend two weeks at RM in October 1825, and near the end of this visit DW wrote, “Miss Honeyman has been staying with us a fortnight – very happy – She has had a whole summer of quiet rambling, and returns with pleasure to her winter duties at Penrith. She has a small house there – has a comfortable independence of her own making, and is able thoroughly to enjoy it. Her good religious and moral principles, and her great desire to be useful provide her with constant enjoyment, so she is not like one put out of place by relinquishing the labours of her Business. Dora and I find her an excellent companion.”

Jackson, Rev. William (1792–1878, age 33): The son of Grasmere’s long-time rector, Thomas Jackson (1758–1821), who, after attending both Cambridge and Oxford, briefly returned home to teach school (where his pupils included the young John Wordsworth) before becoming Perpetual Curate of St. James’ Church in Whitehaven in 1821. Clearly impressed by this young neighbor, WW maintained in 1816 that “he is without exception one of the most admirable Clergymen for his years that I have known. He is very clever, very zealous, an excellent Scholar, [and] has no discernible northern dialect or pronunciation.”

Rev. Jackson remained close to the Wordsworths, especially John, throughout the period of the RJ, with DW openly wishing in 1825 that he were not so “zealous in the performance of his duties,” as it meant his occasional visits back to Grasmere were typically much shorter than she would have preferred.

Jewsbury, Maria Jane (1800–33, age 25, DNB): A promising young writer from Manchester who, after dedicating her debut collection, Phantasmagoria, to WW in early 1825, began a correspondence with the poet that quickly blossomed into an intimate friendship with the entire family at RM. Miss Jewsbury, or Jane to her close friends, spent most of her most of her adolescence in Leicestershire, where her father, Thomas (1767–1840), ran a series of only moderately successful textile mills. Seeking a fresh start, he moved his family to Manchester in 1818 and found work selling cotton goods and fire insurance. A year later, however, tragedy struck, when his wife, Maria (née Smith, 1778–1819), died shortly after delivering their seventh child, leaving the then-19-year-old Jane responsible for raising her younger siblings. Despite these heavy domestic obligations and her often debilitating chronic sicknesses, Jewsbury began regularly contributing to the Manchester Gazette in 1821, and by the mid-1820s she seemed poised to join the likes of Letitia Landon, Caroline Bowles, and Felicia Hemans in the vanguard of English “poetesses.” Upon first meeting this vivacious young writer in the spring of 1825, DW called her “a young woman of extraordinary talents, . . . a good Daughter, a good Sister to a numerous Family at the head of which she was left.”

The admiration was mutual, as later that year, while confiding a fear of growing old to Dora, Jewsbury mused, “if I could age like your Aunt W – & unite green vigour with grey maturity, it were well – but who is like her?”

Knott, Susannah (1774?–1828, age 51?): A longtime acquaintance of the Wordsworths who lived at Green Bank, the Ambleside home she had shared with her grandmother, Dorothy Knott (1730–1820), until the latter’s death.

Over several generations, the Knotts had steadily risen from ordinary Westmorland statesmen to one of the area’s most affluent and well-connected clans, having intermarried with the Huddlestons of Hutton and Flemings of Rayrigg and Rydal. Prior to its sale in 1802, RM—or “High House,” as it was historically known—had been home to several generations of Knotts.

DW’s repeated visits to Green Bank in Notebook 1 were likely charitable rather than social in nature, as Miss Knott’s 1828 obituary would note that her death had come “after a long illness.”

Luff, Letitia (1775–1871, age 50): An exuberant, free-spending widow whose friendship with the Wordsworths dated to the early 1800s, when she and her husband, Charles (d. 1815), were young newlyweds living near Ullswater.

Little is known about either of the Luffs’ backgrounds except that she seems to have come from London and he, according to DW, was “ruined by a bad education and early indulgence with the prospect of an independent and large fortune.”

Until 1810 the childless couple lived comfortably in a picturesque Patterdale cottage that DW considered “a paradise.”

By late 1811, however, their financial situation had become so dire that they were forced to decamp for Mauritius, where Mr. Luff worked as a colonial paymaster until his untimely death in 1815.

Widowed at forty with little apparent support from extended family, Mrs. Luff remained in Mauritius for two years, residing at the governor’s mansion with the Farquhars. After returning to England with these friends in early 1818, she spent most of the next seven years at the Farquhars’ London townhouse and at Playford Hall, the Suffolk estate of her old Ullswater friends Thomas and Catherine Clarkson.

By WW’s account, after even a short tenure in Mauritius, Mr. Luff “left enough behind him to make his Widow independent,” and in early 1825 Mrs. Luff used this inheritance to buy her new Loughrigg residence, Fox Ghyll, and begin the ambitious renovations and expansions that for years to come would baffle her frugal friends at RM.

By October of 1825 DW had grown so worried that Mrs. Luff’s spending outstripped her £150 annual income as to sermonize, “It is a good thing for women in general to have a master, and Mrs. Luff should always have had one – I mean a legal master; for she will have her own way now that he is gone who had the sole right to manage her.”

Myers, Julia (1811–45, age 14): The orphaned daughter of John Myers (1767–1821), a first cousin of the Wordsworths who had been WW’s boon companion at Cambridge and became a London barrister before inheriting Pow House in Cumberland in 1813.

In the years between losing her mother, Rachel (née Bridge, 1775–1817), in 1817 and her father in 1821, Julia had begun attending the Dowlings’ girls’ school in Ambleside. And, after the latter tragedy, she stayed on at the school and spent most of her holidays with her nearby relations, the Wordsworths and the Robinsons.

North, Ford (1764–1842, age 61) and Sarah (née Ashworth, 1769–1829, age 56): The Wordsworths’ predecessors at RM who lived thereafter in Ambleside, where they raised their large family at The Oaks and Mr. North worked as an estate agent and farmed the land adjacent to Brathay Hall.

Notices of the couple’s 1800 wedding identify him as hailing from Liverpool—where his father was a successful merchant and his maternal grandfather an eminent ironmaster—and her from Manchester.

In 1802 they purchased RM from the house’s ancestral owners, the Knotts, and, after initially using it for holidays, they made it their primary residence in 1805.

During the family’s relatively brief stay in Rydal, they apparently made few friends, with DW writing in 1809 that Mr. North was “a Man hated by all his Neighbours” and other reports suggesting that Mrs. North attracted general ire for setting herself up as the local Lady Bountiful during the community’s 1808 relief efforts for the Green orphans.

Aggravated, on their end, by lingering disputes with neighbors over tax rates and timber rights, the Norths sold RM to Lady Diana le Fleming of Rydal Hall in early 1813 and prepared to move to Ambleside.

Their sluggish departure from RM—despite knowing that the new tenants, the Wordsworths, were anxious to move in—only heightened friction between the families, with even the mild-mannered DW claiming she had lost all inclination to “repent” for “having spoken so ill-naturedly of the Norths” in the past.

Over the ensuing decade, however, old grudges faded, largely because of friendships that grew up among the younger generation, and the RJ record the Wordsworths and Norths socializing surprisingly often given their earlier history.

Robinson, Capt. Charles (1788–1864, age 37) and Charlotte (née Kearsley, 1798–1862, age 27): WW and DW’s first cousin once removed and the daughter of a successful Manchester merchant he had married in 1822. Capt. Robinson’s mother, Mary (née Myers, 1765–1852), was the second wife of Adm. Hugh Robinson (1736–1802), a highly decorated naval officer who retired to York with a fortune estimated at £30,000.

As his parents’ firstborn, Charles was groomed for his father’s profession and went to sea at fourteen. After fighting the French for eight years in the East Indies and another five in the Mediterranean and North Sea, he retired after the peace of 1815 and married the former Miss Kearsley in York seven years later.

In 1823 the newlyweds moved to Rydal, where SH reported their hosting “gay musical parties & what not.”

By the time of the RJ, however, the Robinsons’ social life had been significantly curtailed by their growing family, including the twins whose January 1825 births are chronicled in Notebook 1.

Robinson, Lt. Thomas (1794–1838): A younger brother of Capt. Charles Robinson—and, hence, WW and DW’s first cousin once removed—who spent the autumn of 1825 among his relatives in the Lakes. Like his older brother, Tom went to sea in his early teens, and he ultimately spent twelve years in the Baltic, Mediterranean, North Sea, and Atlantic before being promoted to lieutenant in 1819. By then, he was beginning to contemplate life on land, and while visiting Ambleside during the summer of 1823 he apparently became so enamored of the then-19-year-old Dora as to, unbeknownst to her parents, broach the subject of marriage.

Anxious about his return to the area two years later, Dora confided to Jane Jewsbury, “my Cousin made his appearance at the foot of the hill yesterday – he drank tea with us last night – I somehow think he will not recur to the old subject but still it keeps me in fear & trembling & I have made up my mind to tell my Aunt if he says anything more to me & leave to her the agreeable task of answering for me.”

Judging from the RJ, any attempts Dora or her Aunt Dorothy made to dissuade the 31-year-old “beau from York,” as MW had dubbed him in September, were ineffectual, as Notebook 1 shows the cousins being largely inseparable between his arrival on 8 October and her parents’ return from Coleorton on 17 November.

Thereafter, Tom’s attentions were presumably more discrete, but such was his ardor that, after leaving the area early in the new year, he made his case in writing to WW. The poet responded “instantly” and decisively, thanking his relation for being forthright but bluntly refusing permission on the entirely unromantic grounds that it would be better for all parties if the lieutenant were instead to “look out for some lady with sufficient fortune for both of you,” as “ladies of some fortune are as easily won as those without, and for the most part as deserving.”

Conclusively rebuffed, Tom gave up the pursuit and retired to Clifton, where he died a bachelor in 1838.

Scambler, Alice (née Bownass, 1781–1856, age 44): An Ambleside widow whose husband, Richard (1782–1820), had been the Wordsworths’ physician from the time he opened his practice in 1808 until his death in 1820. DW held the late Mr. Scambler in great affection, especially after his valiant but futile efforts to save WW and MW’s infant daughter Catherine in 1812, when she assured MW and WW, “If you had seen Mr Scambler – if you had seen the humility, the tenderness, the watchfulness with which he administered the medicines – if you had heard him speak with the calm confidence and satisfaction that we did you would have been satisfied.”

His unexpected death left his wife and nine children largely destitute, and DW’s journals show the women of RM making regular charitable visits to Walton Cottage, the Scamblers’ Ambleside home. The family would remain in the area until 1838, when, by MW’s report, Mrs. Scambler, her daughter Elizabeth, “and all the rest of them, poor things, including a grandchild” left “Ambleside, bag and baggage.”

Southey, Robert (1774–1843, age 51, DNB and Edith (née Fricker, 1774–1837, age 51): WW’s fellow “Lake Poet” (and, since 1812, the nation’s poet laureate) and the daughter of a Bristol milliner he had married in 1795, shortly after his fellow “pantisocrat” Samuel Taylor Coleridge had married Edith’s older sister Sarah. Since 1803 the Southeys and Coleridges had lived together at Greta Hall in Keswick, with the former helping to compensate for the financial and emotional support that was increasingly unforthcoming from Mrs. Coleridge’s husband. Despite being routinely linked together in the public mind, Southey and WW were more rivals than friends for the first decade of their acquaintance, especially after Southey published a withering review of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. DW initially shared her brother’s disdain, believing Southey showed “nothing of the dignity or enthusiasm of the Poet’s Character”; but her opinion was irrevocably changed in 1805 by his compassionate response to her brother John’s tragic death, as he “was so tender and kind that I loved him all at once – he wept with us in our sorrow, and for that cause I think I must always love him.”

Over ensuing decades the families grew increasingly close, and the RJ show both the older and younger generations regularly exchanging visits lasting between a few hours and several weeks. Five of the Southeys’ eight children survived through 1825, but only two, Bertha (1809–77, age 16) and Kate (1810–64, age 15), appear in Notebook 1. In the autumn of 1825 these teenaged girls spent two weeks at RM with DW, SH, and their friend Dora, and afterward DW called them both “delightful girls” but singled out Bertha as “an especial favourite of mine.”

Tillbrook, Rev. Samuel (1783–1835, age 42): The son of a Suffolk silversmith who, after attending the free school in Bury St. Edmunds, was admitted to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he earned a BA and an MA and went on to spend two decades as the college’s bursar and a popular tutor.

After meeting him through their mutual friends the Clarksons in 1809, DW wrote that “we liked Mr Tillbrook very much for his unaffected manners,” but, presumably alluding to his laboring-class roots, she also noted “a coarseness, a want of polish about him which might be smoothed away with advantage.”

Eight years later, as a confirmed bachelor in his mid-thirties, Tillbrook bought Ivy Cottage at the bottom of Rydal Hill. Since his commitments at Peterhouse precluded inhabiting the house for much of the year, he typically leased it out, and over time several of his tenants—including the Quillinans, Gees, and Elliotts—became intimates of the Wordsworths. While Tillbrook himself developed a cordial relationship with his neighbors, he never became as close to WW as he was to Robert Southey.

Watson, Dorothy (née Wilson, 1752–1831): The widow of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff (1737–1816, DNB), of Calgarth Hall near Bowness. The late bishop had been a towering figure on the national stage, earning separate reputations as a Cambridge chemist, “improving” agriculturalist, Whig politician, and liberal prelate.

After retiring to Calgarth in the 1790s, this favorite son of the region quickly became, by De Quincey’s account, “the leading person about the Lakes, as regarded rank and station.”

If anything, the bishop’s wife had an even more elite Westmerian pedigree, being the granddaughter of Sir William Fleming of Rydal Hall on her mother’s side and the long-time MP Daniel Wilson of Dallam Tower on her father’s. After her husband’s passing in 1816, Mrs. Watson remained at Calgarth with her five unmarried daughters: Dorothy (1777–1831, age 48), Harriet (1779–1835, age 46), Elizabeth (1780–1859, age 45), Charlotte (1783–1859, age 42), and Mary (1785–1847, age 40).

While the Watsons and Wordsworths rarely interacted during the bishop’s lifetime, they became increasingly friendly thereafter, partly as a reflecting of the Wordsworths’ increasing standing both in the community and beyond. The RJ show the families exchanging visits a few times each year, and DW noted in a February 1826 letter that “at Rydal we get no new publications except through Southey – and sometimes from the Watsons of Calgarth (the Bishop’s Daughters).”