When Dorothy Wordsworth wrote her Alfoxden Journal, she might as well have had St Andrews in mind. Like Grasmere, St Andrews has “silver lines of water between the ridges” and a “sea hid by mist all day”.
The landscapes through which she meandered seem to me, a student prone to idealisation, a perfect reflection of the “steep and lofty cliffs” that have seen many English students lose their minds over deadlines.
Dorothy was accompanied by her brother and his close friend, the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who I know would have loved our little town and its refreshing ethos.
Credit: European Romanticisms in Association.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s account of the paths she took and the tea she drank is of Grasmere and Alfoxden. Yet, it was in St Andrews that the manuscript holding the pastoral incarnate was likely lost circa 130 years ago.
This story would only be recounted much later in Professor William Knight, 1836-1916: 'Wordsworthian discoverer, enabler and publicist'. I refuse to believe I am the only one that has realised there is no single boring day here.
William Angus Knight was a Scottish Free Church minister and Professor of Moral Philosophy in our university from 1876 to 1903. While embarking on his educationalist, reformist, and activist mission, he had taken cover in Edgecliffe and, later, Castle House (currently the Schools of Metaphysics and Logic, and English respectively) on The Scores.
Among other things, he pushed for the introduction of the LLA diploma for women in 1877, well before they could graduate in the university, and campaigned for the proceeds to go towards the founding of University Hall (the first female hall) in 1896.
Credit: Sarah Fehr.
A lover of all things Wordsworth, he had taken on the task of transcribing and analysing Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. St Andrews, a town that at the time had close links with William Wordsworth’s family, reflected the rural pathways described in the diary.
In between lectures and seminars, he would covet the five notebooks that had reached his hands and would look back on the “earthly paradise” (as the UNESCO put it) that the Wordsworths had the pleasure to experience, all from his window in The Scores.
His transcription, however, became indispensable in literary history for the wrong reasons: the fifth notebook, covering most of 1801, disappeared from his bedside one unfortunate evening (the circumstances are as blurry with age as the pages would be now).
Despite the many uncatalogued items in the Special Collections archive of the St Andrews University library, it is unlikely to be there. Jonathan Wordsworth guessed it might be in a private collection somewhere in America.
What we do know is that St Andrews students have the privilege of experiencing a renewal of the prelapsarian nature with which the Romantics had fallen in love.
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