segunda-feira, junho 21, 2004
Cheers, sistah.
Childhood home of Wordsworth brought back to life
£1m restoration of poet's birthplace in Cockermouth where he spent his 'sweet childish days' aims to inspire new generations
David Ward
Monday June 21, 2004
The Guardian
The house in the Lake District where William Wordsworth grew up "foster'd alike by beauty and by fear" reopens to the public tomorrow after a £1m refit designed to show how the child was father of the man.
"We want visitors to be inspired to go away and find out more about Wordsworth and his poetry," said Kate Hilton, curator of Wordsworth House, Cockermouth, where the poet was born in 1770. "And perhaps to find out more about life in 18th-century Cumbria."
The people of Cockermouth bought the grand Georgian house, the finest in the town, when it was about to be demolished to make way for a bus station, and gave it to the National Trust in 1938.
It has been closed for eight months for renovation, redecoration and even revolution: in some rooms visitors, especially children, will be encouraged to touch, play and make a noise. "We want children to behave as children do," Ms Hilton said.
The idea is that they should get some idea of the intense happiness William and his sister Dorothy knew in the house, with its walled garden and terrace overlooking the river Derwent. Wordsworth relived the memory in book one of The Prelude:
When, having left his
Mountains, to the Towers
Of Cockermouth that
beauteous River came,
Behind my Father's House
he pass'd close by,
Along the margin of our
Terrace Walk.
He was a Playmate whom
we dearly lov'd.
Oh! many a time have I, a
five years' Child,
A naked Boy, in one
delightful Rill,
A little Mill-race sever'd
from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a
summer's day ...
"William and Dorothy were allowed a degree of freedom to roam and play and that experience of childhood was critical to the man he was to become," Ms Hilton said. "We want to convey to visitors the way the family lived here."
The Wordsworths were living above their station: the poet's father, John, occupied the house as agent to the landowner and politician Sir James Lowther, who was known as Wicked Jimmy.
Sir James used the best rooms at the front for entertaining; the Wordsworths lived in humbler rooms at the back. But the idyll did not last. Anne Wordsworth died in 1778, leaving five young children. William, then seven, was shipped off to school in Hawkshead, mourning the mother he later described as "the heart and hinge of all our learnings and our loves"; Dorothy, who was six, was sent to Halifax.
Admirers wanting to continue the Wordsworth story will be able to move on to Dove Cottage, the poet's modest home in Grasmere, and then to Rydal Mount, where he lived in his retirement.
The renovation and reinterpretation of the Cockermouth house, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Rural Regeneration Cumbria and the European Regional Development Fund, was prompted by a rethink about its future.
"The idea was that the house needed to change if it was to stay open permanently," Ms Hilton said.
"Cockermouth, which is off the usual Lake District tourist routes, does not get thousands of visitors and numbers here were dwindling. We had to think carefully about what we could do. The house is significant as the childhood home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and it seemed best to present it as that."
What followed was a four-year research programme to find out what the house would have looked like in the second half of the 18th century and what life was like in Cockermouth in the same period.
Adults will see the elegant dining room and panelled drawing room with a recreation of the "large and handsome Wilton carpet" that a contemporary sale advertisement revealed had graced its floor.
They will also admire the hangings on Anne Wordsworth's four-poster and wonder at how the trust's craftspeople scraped up to 14 layers of paint off the walls to find and apply the muted colours the Wordsworths would have known.
In an upstairs bedroom, children will be free to bounce on the bed's horsehair mattress and play with modern recreations of Georgian toys.
Visitors who are not easily embarrassed will be able to chat with the Wordsworths' servants - clerk, nursemaid, manservant, general maid and cook (in a functioning 18th-century kitchen).
"We have brought the house to life," Ms Hilton said. "The trust has tried very hard to make it accessible in every way to a large audience."
The hope is that, after a little emotion recollected in tranquillity, future generations will, like William and Dorothy, "talk of sunshine and of song, / And summer days, when we were young; / Sweet childish days that were as long / As twenty days are now".
posted by
Viviane at 9:45:00 AM
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