By Aubrey Mandichak, Guest Writer
LANCASTER, ENGLAND –
“I resolved to write a journal of the time till W & J return, & I set about keeping my resolve because I will not quarrel with myself, & because I shall give Wm Pleasure by it when he comes home again.”
The above is an excerpt from the first entry of The Grasmere Journal, Dorothy Wordsworth’s account of living with her brother, William Wordsworth, in the Lake District town of Grasmere. The attitude it expresses has been hugely influential on me since reading it a few weeks back, and while it wasn’t what inspired me to write a journal (I resolved to do that long before I came to England for study abroad) it has inspired me to try a new instrument, to see an unexpected show in London’s West End, and to take the hike from Ambleside to Grasmere.
If you don’t know what that means, it’s okay. A few weeks ago, I didn’t either. In fact, a few weeks ago, I didn’t know anything about any Wordsworths (aside from those accursed daffodils!). It wasn’t until my seminar’s visit to Grasmere and to Dove Cottage, the Wordsworths’ home, that I became interested in Wordsworth at all—Dorothy, that is. Her life, what little I learned in the museum tour, appealed so snugly to the themes of my own. She held a close, platonic relationship with her brother, with whom she lived, worked and created. To be close to someone you love and to inspire each other seems ideal to me. I had to know if it was to her. I bought her journal that day.
You will find within the journal beautiful poetic prose (Beatrix Potter said Dorothy was the better poet), cheeky little insights into the day-to-day of some of the most famous romantic poets, and walking. Lots and lots of walking. Most days, Dorothy would make the six-mile round trip from Grasmere to Ambleside and back, just to get her mail. One day she made it twice. For reasons beyond me, I resolved to make Dorothy Wordsworth’s mail trek, and I set about keeping my resolve.
I brought a piece of my own mail, a letter penned the night before, ready to be stamped and sent. I also set the goal to get a piece of Grasmere Gingerbread when I arrived, which is worth it.
Google maps had the walk from Ambleside to Grasmere (reversed because of logistics) at four miles, one more than Dorothy’s, but I didn’t realize that then. For most of the walk, I saw that the blue dotted line was surrounded by pure green. I had expected to walk through pastures. The walk would take an hour and a half, quite a bit, but nothing I haven’t done before. And besides, if I couldn’t make it back, there was a bus. I hate to plan for failure though. This was doable.
And then I walked up a sheer driveway, steeper than anything I had expected, and came face to face with a gate and a rocky mountain path. It turns out that all that green was not just pastures, but the vertical, mountainous pastures of the Lake District—far more involved than I had expected. Still, I had a resolve to keep.
It was here that I became certain that I was no longer on Dorothy’s path. I had known from the beginning that this would not be a truly historical exercise—after all, Dorothy didn’t have to dodge cars on the stretch of highway leading to my alpine doom, but I had thought that it would at least be a similar path. But this couldn’t have been Dorothy’s route. She would have written about it—about the pain in her calves and the bottoms of her feet, and about the sublime views of the sun through the trees and over the mountains, enough to make anyone quiver.
I made it to Grasmere. Sweaty and dizzy, my backpack weighing 2,000 pounds, I rounded the corner out of the woods and there, the first thing I saw, was Dove Cottage. I could’ve stared at it for hours if I wasn’t determined to end my dread quest.
I got my gingerbread, I mailed my letter, and, because I will not quarrel with myself, I took the bus home.
Here’s to Dorothy Wordsworth, a great writer, and a better walker than I am.
This article originally appeared on page 22 of the October 2025 edition of The Gettysburgian’s magazine.
