The Wordsworth Trust has acquired Rydal Mount, a historic house in the Lake District, marking a significant expansion of literary heritage sites. This purchase makes William Wordsworth one of a select group of authors, including Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, to have more than one of his former residences open to the public. The trust, which already owns Dove Cottage, will reopen Rydal Mount after renovations, offering visitors a deeper insight into the poet's life.
A Year of Renewed Interest in Literary Icons
Interest in all things Jane Austen remains high, following celebrations of her 250th anniversary. In September, the museum based in her former home in Chawton, Hampshire, will host a Persuasion festival. However, a less obvious beneficiary of this spike is the Wordsworth Trust, which has seen an influx of visitors to Dove Cottage in Cumbria. This surge is attributed to the success of the BBC television series The Other Bennet Sister, which portrayed Mary, a minor character in Austen's Pride and Prejudice, as a Wordsworth enthusiast.
These homes can be extraordinarily evocative places, brought to life by knowledgeable guides. The modest cottages occupied by Hardy and Coleridge before they were famous stand in stark contrast to the aristocratic grandeur of other National Trust houses, serving as important reminders of how ordinary people once lived. In homes such as Monk's House in East Sussex, near where Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, and Keats House in Hampstead, where the poet became ill with tuberculosis, death casts unavoidable shadows.
Challenges and Opportunities in Preserving Literary Heritage
Rydal Mount was sold by its previous owners in part due to a drop in visitor numbers, highlighting the challenges of maintaining such properties. Curators must be adept at capitalising on new sources of interest. At the Brontë Parsonage in Yorkshire, an exhibition accompanied this year's release of a new Wuthering Heights film; at Anne Hathaway's cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon, Hamnet tours are on offer.
Turning homes into museums is not the only way to commemorate writers in the built environment. Edinburgh's main railway station, Waverley, is famously the only one in the world named after a novel; Walter Scott, who wrote it, also has a monument across the road. National portrait galleries in Edinburgh and London depict authors alongside artists, scientists, royals, politicians, and others. Buildings across the UK are adorned with blue plaques; William Shakespeare has a statue in Leicester Square.
Gaps in Representation and Future Prospects
No writer of colour has yet had their British home turned into a museum. Since this transformation generally happens years after an author's death, this is not surprising; immigrants from India, the Caribbean, and Africa, and their descendants, mostly made their mark on the world of books from the mid-20th century onwards. Hopefully, more houses or flats will be opened in future; VS Naipaul's book The Enigma of Arrival offers a vivid, semi-fictional account of his years in a borrowed cottage on a Wiltshire estate.
George Eliot is a more perplexing absence from the map of homes to visit – all the more so since her novel Middlemarch recently topped two Guardian polls. While the London house that she shared with George Henry Lewes was demolished, and the Arbury Estate where she was born is currently closed, efforts to restore a building linked to her family near Nuneaton have so far not succeeded. However, a replica of her sitting room is in the town's museum, while Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery has her piano and desk. Fundraisers should be encouraged to try again: the 150th anniversary of her death falls in 2030.
