Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape

Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape is a collection of digitized primary sources from The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, U.K. William Wordsworth’s original verse manuscripts, working notebooks, correspondence, and selected annotated editions are major features of the collection. The collection also includes writings of Dorothy Wordsworth, such as her Grasmere Journals, Alfoxden diary, and travel journals. Other highlights include verse manuscripts by and correspondence from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey. Some of the collection’s notable manuscripts are William Wordworth’s “The Prelude” and “Michael,” Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” and De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.”

The collection also includes over 2,500 art pieces from the Wordsworth Trust’s fine art collection. The primary subject of the art collection is the Lake District in Great Britain. Pieces are by significant romantic artists, including John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, Benjamin Robert Haydon, and John Ruskin.

The broader cultural milieu of the romantic era and the Lake District is further illustrated through the inclusion of guidebooks, maps, scrapbooks, financial records, and photographs of the Lake District.