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GARDENING CITY HISTORY
Words themselves / Move us with conscious pleasure” (William Wordsworth, 1798)
Walking Wordsworth’s Bristol In April we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of poet William Wordsworth. Renowned as Poet Laureate and one of the Romantic-era ‘Lake Poets’, Wordsworth also spent his early years being inspired by the West Country. Historian Catherine Pitt looks at his time in Bristol...
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ristol has been home to some of the greatest artists, painters, musicians and writers in history. The city has always been a hotbed of radical thinking and dissenters and none more so than in the late 18th century. This period is known as the Romantic Era (c.1770-1850) and was an exciting but restless time. Romanticism was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. The Romantics wanted to return to connecting with nature and with strong emotions. Just as Extinction Rebellion today looks to reconnect people with nature, so too did Romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Around 1795, a young aspiring poet, William Wordsworth, returned to England from revolutionary France. On meeting likeminded supporters in London he was encouraged to visit Bristol. Wordsworth was known to enjoy walking tours of both Europe and Britain, so to celebrate his anniversary, we embarked on our own Wordsworth walk of Bristol. 34 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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APRIL 2020
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No 190
No. 7 Great George Street
Today the Georgian House Museum – which recently played host to the city’s first solo Yoko Ono exhibition – this was the home of John Pinney, slave owner and sugar merchant. Between 21 August and 26 September 1795 Wordsworth was invited to stay here by Pinney’s sons whom he had met in London. Pinney agreed to let William and his sister Dorothy stay in their property at Racedown, Dorset, rent free. Although Pinney had become wealthy on the back of slavery, he encouraged reformers and freethinkers to meet and debate at his home. It is believed that it was at one such event organised by Pinney that Wordsworth met, for the first time, Bristol-born poet Robert Southey and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge with whom Wordsworth formed lasting (if not at times tempestuous friendships). “I stayed at Bristol at least five weeks with a family whom I found amiable in all its branches” – William Wordsworth to friend William Mathews, October 1795.
