ABSTRACT
On a sunny day in mid-August 1850, during the first tourist season after Wordsworth’s death, a traveller carrying sketchbooks entered the village of Hawkshead. He – or she – had just finished some rough sketches of the church and grammar school and enquired of a villager where the house was in which the late poet laureate had boarded as a schoolboy. Eventually he was told that it was probably a cottage at the bottom of Vicarage Lane, then occupied by an old widow, Mrs Ormandy. A long-term inhabitant of Hawkshead, she must have heard something about the famous former boarder in her house. With her permission, the artist began to make a sketch of the building – a very elaborate and conscientious representation of the cottage, reflecting the artist’s affection and admiration for the poet. Evidently this artist was a devoted Wordsworthian, walking in the footsteps of the poet soon after his death and making sketches of various places and objects in the landscape associated with him. These sketches were later gathered in an album titled Wordsworth, and several generations later, it was presented to the Wordsworth Trust in 2006 by Dr Duncan Thomson in memory of Dr Robert Woof, the Trust’s first Director. 1
