Paradox Inn: Home and Passing through at Grasmere

This essay explores the paradoxical concepts of home and passing-through in relation to Dove Cottage, in Grasmere, in the English Lake District. Dove Cottage was home to the poet William Wordsworth from 1799 to 1808, during which time he wrote or conceived most of what is considered his finest poetry, much of which is concerned with Grasmere and the Lake District, and with dwelling in place. The cottage was the centre of the ‘Home at Grasmere’ of Wordsworth’s eponymous poem, written whilst living there: the cottage he would name in his poetry ‘our happy castle’, ¹ and ‘a home within a home’. ² It was the home planned and shared with his sister Dorothy, who recorded it in her Grasmere journal, and to which Wordsworth brought Mary Hutchinson when he married her in 1802, and where their first three children were born. It was a home whose doors were opened not only to the extended family (including William and Dorothy’s brother John, and Mary’s sisters Sara and Joanna), but to many friends, notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the young Thomas De Quincey, who would later make his own home there, and write about it.