Mary Barker’s maid and one of the four people who, along with Dorothy, summited Scafell Pike on 7 October 1818. In Dorothy’s account she is mentioned but not named (e.g., “We had some miles to travel to the foot of the mountain, and accordingly went thither in a cart—Miss Barker, her maid, and myself”). She is identified as Agnes in Jonathan Otley’s May 1855 letter to the editor of the Kendal Mercury, which notes that Agnes also accompanied Mary Barker on her first visit to Esk Hause. In 1819, she accompanied Barker to her new home in Boulogne, France.

Mentioned In     
“Excursion up Scawfell Pike”

The unnamed “kind neighbor of Miss Barker’s, a statesman and shepherd of the vale,” who guided Barker and Dorothy Wordsworth to Esk Hause and then to the summit of Scafell Pike in October 1818.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion up Scawfell Pike”

Town End neighbors of the Wordsworths whose home, Below Sike, was opposite Dove Cottage. Thomas was a widower with five young daughters, including his newborn Sarah (a. k. a. “Sally”), when he married Margaret “Peggy” Lancaster of Grasmere in 1791 (GJ, 163). During their years as neighbors, the Ashburner girls did odd jobs for the Wordsworths and Thomas supplied them with coal. In 1823 theWGreported that “Thomas Ashburner, aged 70, holds the Cottage and Garden [at Town End] for his life, free from payment of rent” (14 June 1823).

Mentioned In    
“A Narrative concerning George & Sarah Green, Grasmere Journal”

A lively friend of Dorothy who was a writer, a music teacher, an amateur painter, and a fell walker. Mary met Robert Southey in Portugal in 1800 and became a close friend, eventually settling next door to his family in Keswick (1812–1817). Over time, she became acquainted with the broader Southey-Coleridge-Wordsworth circle, close especially with Dorothy and Sara Hutchinson. In 1816, she overextended herself financially to build a new home in Rosthwaite, Borrowdale, where she lived for just a short time, despite her love for the landscape and having become an “active climber of the hills.” This house was the starting place for the 1818 Scafell Pike. In the following year, Mary moved to Boulogne in order to retrench and never returned to England, but the Wordsworths continued to correspond with her, and they visited her in France during their 1820 Continental Tour. In 1830, she married a younger man named Mr. Slade, concerning her friends at home. The most complete source on her life is David Bradbury’s Senhora Small Fry: Mary Barker and the Lake Poets(2003).

Mentioned In    
“Excursion up Scawfell Pike”

Childless couple who were major patrons of the arts and, from 1803, close friends of the Wordsworths. Sir George was an amateur landscape painter, art collector, and major force in establishing the National Gallery. He married Margaret, the granddaughter of Lord Chief Justice John Willes, in 1778, and the two honeymooned at Keswick. Revisiting the town 25 years later, they met the Coleridges, Southeys, and William Wordsworth. Soon thereafter, Lady Margaret and Dorothy struck up an epistolary friendship, and, although they wouldn’t meet in person until 1806, Dorothy apparently composed her journal-like “Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater (apparatus)” for her new friend in 1805. In later years the Wordsworths would regularly visit them at their Leicestershire estate, Coleorton, and their London townhouse in Grosvenor Square.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion up Scawfell Pike,”  “Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater (apparatus)”

A prominent Scottish clergyman and educational reformer renowned for the “Madras System,” a plan that called for advanced students to tutored their less advanced peers which he developed at an orphan asylum in India. Bell met the Wordsworths through his close friend and later biographer Robert Southey. According to Southey’s Life, after Bell requested Dorothy’s feedback on his Madras school book, she “spent much time and labour in remodeling the work for him, and, indeed, entirely rewrote it, much to his apparent satisfaction at the time; subsequently, however, he threw this manuscript aside, and published it nearly as he had originally composed it.” William Johnson, the addressee of Dorothy’s 1818 Scafell Pike letter, was the head of Bell’s Central School in London. As a link between Dorothy, Johnson, and Lord Kenyon, Bell may have been involved in the production of the “Kenyon Transcript.” By his death in 1832, his National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Christian Church had charge of more than 12,000 schools.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion up Scawfell Pike” (apparatus)

An Ambleside apothecary and schoolteacher who married on 11 February 1824. As the Wordsworths’ physician after 1820, Mr. Carr was a regular visitor to Rydal Mount (Letters, 3:133; MWL, 332). Dorothy’s trust in and affection for him is evident in her letters and journals and her late poem “To Thomas Carr, My Medical Attendant” . Mrs. Carr was a former governess who moved to Ambleside in the early 1810s to teach at Mrs. Fletcher’s school for girls. After taking over the school in 1818, she briefly employed her former student Dora Wordsworth as a teacher. In the early 1830s, the Carrs moved from Cumpstone Lodge in Ambleside to Hill Top in Near Sawrey, a home now associated with its later occupant, Beatrix Potter.

Mentioned In    
Poems, Rydal Journals

Couple whom William Wordsworth met in 1799 while touring the Lake District with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A famous abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson temporarily retired to his Ullswater estate in 1794 when the war with France stalled the movement to end slavery. Two years later, he married Catherine Buck of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, a like-minded gentlewoman. According to her childhood friend (and later boon companion of the Wordsworths) Henry Crabb Robinson, she “was the most eloquent woman I have ever known, with the exception of Madame de Staël. She had a quick apprehension of every kind of beauty and made her own whatever she learned.” Though the Clarksons left the Lakes in 1804, when Thomas returned to public life, their friendship with the Wordsworths endured and Caroline became one of Dorothy’s most regular correspondents. In 1807, Thomas would help achieve the long-delayed passage of the Slave Trade Act.

Mentioned In    
The Grasmere Journal, “Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater,” “A Narrative concerning George & Sarah Green”, Rydal Journals

Second surviving child of Samuel Taylor and Sara Coleridge. Derwent was born at Greta Hall in Keswick soon after his parents moved to the Lakes to be near the Wordsworths. During their years at Reverend John Dawes’s school in Ambleside, he and his older brother, Hartley, often stayed with the Wordsworths on weekends. After working as a private tutor and studying at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he became a distinguished scholar and educationist.

Mentioned In    
The Grasmere Journal, “Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater”

Eldest son of Samuel Taylor and Sara Coleridge who became something of a surrogate son to the Wordsworths after spending weekends with them between 1808 and 1815. After graduating from Merton College, Oxford, in 1818, Hartley began a feckless early adulthood that included being dismissed from a fellowship at Oriel College on charges of “sottishness,” failing to launch a career as a London magazine writer, returning to Ambleside to teach at his former school, and returning to periodical writing after the school was shuttered. While he later enjoyed moderate success as an essayist and poet, he died a childless bachelor who, in the eyes of many, had never fulfilled his early promise.

Mentioned In    
Rydal Journals

Poet, critic, philosopher, walker, and beloved early friend of Dorothy and William Wordsworth. In 1800, Coleridge and his wife, Sara, moved to Greta Hall in Keswick, 13 miles from Dove Cottage. In 1804, he left Keswick (and his troubled marriage) for Malta and Italy in hopes of recovering his physical and mental health. He returned little recovered in 1806 and almost immediately separated from his wife, leaving her and his daughter at Keswick with the Southeys but arranging for his boys to attend school in Ambleside. Between frequent stints as the Wordsworths’ houseguest, he spent much of 1807–1808 lecturing and writing in London and most of 1809 and early 1810 back in the Lakes launching his new journal,The Friend. After he quarrelling with William in the spring of 1810, he again moved south, this time for good.

Mentioned In    
The Grasmere Journal, “Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater”, “Excursion up Scawfell Pike” (apparatus), “A Narrative concerning George & Sarah Green”, Rydal Journals

Joseph was a bookseller, publisher, and friend of Coleridge and William; he published Coleridge’s early poetry and the first printing of Lyrical Ballads. His older brother Amos died suddenly in 1800.

Mentioned In    
Grasmere Journal

The Fishers (John and Aggy [married 1774] and John’s sister, Molly) lived across the road from Dove Cottage. Molly helped Dorothy with household chores—washing clothes and dishes, lighting fires, and so forth—until 1804, when Aggy died and Molly had to help her brother manage his household.

Mentioned In    
“A Narrative concerning George & Sarah Green,” Grasmere Journal

Manchester-born artist and his ex-barmaid wife who settled in Ambleside in 1800, largely to provide him ready access to the Lake District landscapes that became his stock in trade. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, William Green established himself as the region’s premiere resident artist, and some 705 of his watercolors, sketches, and etchings survive at the Wordsworth Trust. From 1804 he supplemented his income by teaching drawing, eventually training his daughters as assistants. After the Greens were afflicted by a series of disasters in the 1820s, including the deaths of William and his eldest unmarried daughter, Dorothy worked diligently to secure steady employment for their sons.

Mentioned In    
Rydal Journals

Friends of the Wordsworths who lived at Brathay Hall in Ambleside from 1804 to 1834 and whose children grew up alongside William’s. John was an amateur artist best known for pencil sketches of his family. Janet, who hailed from Edinburgh, became his second wife in 1803.

Mentioned In    
Rydal Journals

Sara Hutchinson was the unmarried younger sister of Mary Wordsworth, a close friend of Dorothy’s, and for many years an integral part of the Wordsworth household. Best known, perhaps, as “Asra,” the woman with whom S. T. Coleridge hopelessly fell in love in 1799 (distressing all families concerned), she was an eager mountaineer, a lively correspondent, and a keen mind. It was to her that Dorothy and Mary Barker wrote from the summit of Scafell Pike in 1818. Coleridge said of Sara, “If Sense, Sensibility, Sweetness of Temper, perfect Simplicity and an unpretending Nature, joined to shrewdness & entertainingness, make a valuable Woman, Sarah H. is so.” Joanna was the youngest Hutchinson sister, also unmarried, and also a frequent visitor and companion to Dorothy. Together they traveled to Scotland in 1822 and the Isle of Man in 1828. Dorothy wrote “Lines addressed to Joanna H. from Gwerndovennant June 1826” to this valued sister-in-law. Sara and Joanna both kept house at times for their brother Thomas, who farmed in various locations, including Gallow Hill (Yorkshire), Park House (near Ullswater), and Hindwell (Mid Wales).

Mentioned In    
Grasmere Journal, “Excursion up Scawfell Pike”, “Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater”, Poems

William Johnson, former curate and schoolmaster in Grasmere (1811–1812), was the recipient of the October 1818 letter that contained Dorothy’s account of ascending Scafell Pike. He was intimate with the Wordsworths, and Sara Hutchinson’s letters indicate that he was thought a possible match for her sister Joanna. Johnson was born in Cumberland but ended up spending much of his career in London, having been hired by Dr. Andrew Bell to run a new model school established by the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. His work in training students and fellow teachers was essential to the success of the National Society and of Bell’s Madras system. When he died, an obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine called him the “Patriarch of National Education.”

Mentioned In    
“Excursion up Scawfell Pike”

Historians remember Lord Kenyon primarily as an activist against Catholic emancipation, but he enters Dorothy Wordsworth’s orbit as an associate of Dr. Andrew Bell and Rev. William Johnson. Kenyon, an important lawyer and landowner in North Wales, served with Bell and Johnson as one of the leaders of the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. The second surviving manuscript witness of Dorothy’s 1818 Scafell Pike ascent (a copy made by an unknown hand) was sent to the Hutchinsons under his franking privilege. For this reason, we refer to it as the “Kenyon Transcript.”

Mentioned In    
“Excursion up Scawfell Pike” (apparatus)

Charles Lloyd was a friend and published poetry with Coleridge and Charles Lamb in Poems on Various Occasions (1797). Charles came to live at Old Brathay, Clappersgate, near Ambleside, with his new wife, Sophia, in 1802. Charles’s sister, Priscilla, married Christopher Wordsworth in 1804.

Mentioned In    
“A Narrative Concerning George & Sarah Green,” Grasmere Journal

Charles Luff (from 1803, Captain Luff of the Patterdale Loyal Mountaineers) and his wife, Letitia, lived for some years in a cottage at Side Farm near Goldrill Bridge in Patterdale, though they often took lodgings at Ambleside. The Wordsworths came to know them through the Clarksons soon after settling in Grasmere. In 1812, having suffered financial losses, the Luffs emigrated to Mauritius, where Charles died in 1815. Letitia returned to England, living at Dale Lodge in Grasmere before purchasing and renovating Fox Ghyll near Ambleside in 1825. The Luffs hosted Dorothy and William Wordsworth during their 1805 Ullswater tour.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater,” Rydal Journals

Jane Pollard was Dorothy’s closest childhood friend, whom she met when sent to live with relations in Halifax, West Yorkshire, after her mother’s 1778 death. In 1795 Jane married John Marshall, an industrialist who would turn his father’s Leeds flax-spinning factory into a fortune of roughly £2 million. From 1815 onward, the couple resided at Hallsteads on the shore of Ullswater. Notwithstanding political differences—John enthusiastically supported progressive causes and served as a Whig MP from 1826 to 1830—the Marshalls remained friends with the considerably more conservative Wordsworths until death. The Marshalls eventually had 11 children, and Dorothy addressed one of her poems, “To Julia Marshall — A Fragment,” to one of the daughters, Julia (1809–1841).

Mentioned In    
Poems, Rydal Journals

Montagu, a lawyer, met William Wordsworth in 1795; he lent William money, and William and Dorothy took care of his young son (also Basil) at Racedown and Alfoxden before going to Germany and then moving to Grasmere.

Mentioned In    
Grasmere Journal

A Lake District polymath—a clockmaker, geologist, meteorologist, cartographer, and mountain guide. He lived at Keswick for most of his life. Otley authored a successful Lakeland guidebook, A Concise Description of the English Lakes (eight editions from 1823 to 1849). His letters to the editor of the Kendal Mercury, published in the year before his death, offer details about Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Barker’s 1818 mountaineering adventures that would otherwise be unknown.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion up Scawfell Pike” (apparatus)

After Charles retired from the navy ca. 1820, this couple moved to Ambleside and began socializing with the Wordsworths. Charles was the eldest son of William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s cousin Mary Robinson (née Myers) and Rear-Admiral Hugh Robinson and brother to Lt. Tom Robinson, whose surprise 1825 request for Dora Wordsworth’s hand was rejected by William on the grounds of neither having a secure inheritance. The Robinsons eventually had 10 children.

Mentioned In    
Rydal Journals

Edith was the eldest surviving daughter of Robert and Edith Southey and a close friend to Dora Wordsworth. Bertha was the Southey’s fifth child. The Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth children all grew up together.

Mentioned In   
Poems

Elizabeth was the younger daughter of Joseph Sympson of High Broadraine, vicar of the church at Wythburn for over 50 years. Elizabeth was near in age to Dorothy; she married in 1803 and died the following year. Dorothy spells their last name “Simpson”.

Mentioned In    
Grasmere Journal

A Quaker, poet, abolitionist, and travel writer who lived on his small estate near Yanwath, south of Penrith. He was hired by William Lowther to superintend improvements on his grounds, which had been neglected by the previous Lord Lonsdale. Wordsworthians often remember him as the author of the passage (in his Tours of the British Mountains) that inspired “The Solitary Reaper,” which was composed just before the Wordsworths’ Ullswater tour of November 1805. Wilkinson counted Edmund Burke, Coleridge, the Clarksons, William Wilberforce, and the Wordsworths among his many friends.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater”

William and Dorothy’s youngest sibling. He spent most of adolescence at Hawkshead Grammar School before matriculating at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1792. He eventually received three degrees: a BA in 1796, MA in 1799, and DD in 1810. Largely through his connections with the archbishop of Canterbury, he became a rector in Norfolk in 1804 and domestic chaplain to the archbishop a year later. In later years, he would hold a series of clerical and academic appointments, which provided a platform for his regular defenses of conservative and High Church causes. His largest impact, however, came as an administrator at Trinity College, Cambridge, during the 1820s and 1830s, where he oversaw a series of educational and clerical reforms. In 1804 he married Priscilla Lloyd, the daughter of a wealthy Birmingham banker who, after bearing three sons, tragically died in 1815.

Mentioned In    
Rydal Journals

William and Mary Wordsworth’s oldest and only surviving daughter, who was particularly close to her father and protective of his literary reputation. Her namesake, Dorothy, was something of a third parent to her, often serving as her main disciplinarian and nursing her through chronic illnesses. After struggling in various educational establishments, Dora flourished when Ann Dowling took over the girls’ school in Ambleside in 1818. In adulthood, Dora gradually replaced Dorothy as William’s principal scribe and traveling companion, accompanying him and Coleridge on their summer 1828 tour of Northern Europe. In 1839, William rejected Edward Quillinan’s request for Dora’s hand, ostensibly because of this family friend’s Catholicism and troubled finances but also because of the poet’s deep dependence on his daughter. Eventually, however, he relented and blessed the couple’s May 1841 union. After convalescing from a serious illness in Portugal in 1845 and 1846, Dora returned to Rydal Mount, dying there in July 1847.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater” (letters appendix), Rydal Journals

Dorothy and William’s cousin, the second son of their uncle Richard. He commanded the first two lucrative China voyages of the Earl of Abergavenny (1797–1798, 1799–1800) before recommending Dorothy and William’s brother John as his successor. After his retirement, he resided at Brougham Hall outside Penrith.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater”

Sailor brother of Dorothy and William who planned to establish a permanent home with them in Grasmere. In 1800 he was appointed captain of the Earl of Abergavenny, one of East India Company’s largest merchant ships. Five years later, he and over 200 others died in a shipwreck caused by pilot error off the southern coast of England. Besides leaving his siblings with a permanent sense of loss, his death also proved a financial blow, as they had invested heavily in his personal cargo. Nine months after his death, Dorothy and William were still in deep mourning during their Ullswater tour of November 1805.

Mentioned In    
Grasmere Journal, “Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater”

William and Mary Wordsworth’s oldest child. While widely considered a dull-witted disappointment outside the family, he remained a favorite of Dorothy, who was something of a second mother to William’s children. Owing to fears that John would not be able to pass the mathematics requirement at his father’s alma mater, Cambridge, William arranged for his matriculation at New College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1826. After taking orders, he received the curacy at Whitwick near Coleorton in 1828 and several subsequent livings as a result of his father’s connections. In 1830, John married Isabella Curwen, daughter of an influential Lake District MP, with whom he had six children before her death in 1848.

Mentioned In    
“Excursion on the Banks of Ullswater” (letters appendix), Rydal Journals

William and Mary’s youngest child, born within months of his parents’ respective fortieth birthdays. His reputation for being lazy and spoiled was captured by a mock advertisement his sister Dora and Maria Jane Jewsbury wrote in 1825: “Wants a Situation. A youth of about fifteen years of age. He is able to do any kind of work, but prefers sitting to standing, riding to walking, and lying in bed to anything in the world.” Forbidden by his parents from joining the army in 1828, Willy remained largely aimless until his father made him his Sub-distributor of Stamps in 1831, which paved the way for him to replace William as Distributor in 1842. He married Fanny Eliza Graham in 1847, with whom he had four children.

Mentioned In    
Rydal Journals