Writers In The Lake District
William Wordsworth was not the first to praise the Lake District - Thomas Gray wrote appreciatively of his visit in 1769 - but it is Wordsworth that dominates its literary landscape, not solely through his poetry but also through his still useful Guide to the Lakes (1810). Born in Cockermouth in 1770, he was sent to school in Hawkshead before a stint at Cambridge, a year in France and two in Somerset. In 1799 he returned to the Lake District, settling in the Grasmere district, where he spent the last two-thirds of his life with his sister Dorothy, who not only transcribed his poems but was an accomplished diarist as well. Wordsworth and fellow poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey formed a clique that became known as the "Lake Poets", a label based more on their fluctuating friendships and their shared passion for the region than on any common subject matter in their writings. A fourth member of the Cumbrian literary elite was the critic and essayist Thomas De Quincey , chiefly known today for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . One of the first to fully appreciate the revolutionary nature of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's collaborative Lyrical Ballads , De Quincey became a long-term guest of the Wordsworths in 1807, taking over Dove Cottage from them in 1809. He stayed there until 1820, but it was only in the 1830s that he started writing his Lake Reminiscences , offending Wordsworth and Coleridge in the process. Meanwhile, after short spells at Allan Bank and The Vicarage, both in Grasmere, the Wordsworths made Rydal Mount their home, supported largely by William's position as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland and his later stipend as Poet Laureate. After his death in 1850, William's body was interred in St Oswald's churchyard in Grasmere, to be joined five years later by Dorothy and by his wife Mary four years after that. Inspired by Wordsworth's writings and by the terrain itself, the social philosopher and art critic John Ruskin also made the Lake District his home, settling at Brantwood outside Coniston in 1872. His letters and watercolours reflect a deep love of the area, also demonstrated by his unsuccessful fight to prevent the damming of Thirlmere. Much of Ruskin's feeling for the countryside permeated through to two other literary immigrants, Arthur Ransome , also a Coniston resident and writer of the children's classic Swallows and Amazons , and Beatrix Potter , whose favourite Lakeland spots feature in her children's stories.
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