Educational Media Reviews Online

You’re taken on an intimate tour of Dove Cottage in the town of Grassmere in England’s Lake District, most famous for being the home of the Romantic poet WilliamWoodsworth. You see copies of the poet’s original manuscripts close up. You are read Wordsworth’s glorious transcendent, timeless words. Your eyes travel through and over the resplendent lakes, trees, hills, the pastel-inflected fauna and flora. “You’re encircled,” and “Grassmere holds you within itself,” says Wordsworth scholar Sally Bushell.

Wordsworth was born in the Lake District, and goes back to it in 1799 with his sister Dorothy to live a life of “divinity and truth.” He will write many of his most famous poems there. Simon Bainbridge shows how Dorothy’s diaries influenced her brother’s poetry. When Wordsworth marries and moves out of Dove Cottage, the journalist Thomas de Quincy moves in. De Quincey, most famous for Confessions of an English Opium Eater, writes a book about the Lake District. The writers become friends, though De Quincey feels that Wordsworth never fully accepts him as an intellectual equal. He reveals to the public unflattering details: that William is unchivalrous towards women, that his wife has a squint, that Dorothy is unfeminine, “all kinds of little details that fascinated the Victorian readership” and feed Wordsworth’s celebrity status. For the Woodsworths, “It’s a horrible reprise of what they went through with Coleridge years before.” For the viewer, it’s lush Romantic lore.

Nature, poetry, history, biography, and gossip fill the screen. This artfully produced documentary informs, inspires, and will make you want to take a walking tour of the Lake District and “dance with the daffodils,” too.