OCA preloader logo
British Library romantic and Victorian literary treasures

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

I wandered like a lonely thumb

I wandered like a lonely

‘I wandered like a lonely.’  Not the words of a pupil learning by heart a selected work of one of the Romantic poets now deemed essential reading for English Literature GCSE pupils, but the words of William Wordsworth.  Later, of course, he changed the word order.
From the manuscript of the handwritten poems that Wordsworth sent in batches to his publishers Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme between 1806 and 1807 we see that the poet drew his pen firmly through ‘I wandered like a lonely’.  He capitalised the Clouds, Hills and Vales – a Continental fashion of which the strict grammarians of the time disapproved.  Before they were golden, the Daffodils danced.  Before the Daffodils became a host, they were something different, the h, o, s and t scored thickly into the page, the ink obscuring the earlier choice of collective noun.

A page from the handwritten manuscripts sent by William Wordsworth to his publisher in 1806 and 1807.
A page from the handwritten manuscripts sent by William Wordsworth to his publisher in 1806 and 1807.

How many serious scholars of literature, I wonder, have sought out the original of this page over the last 200 years? Now, even the most casual reader of lyrical poetry can find it in the collection of 1,200 romantic and Victorian literary treasures the British Library has just made available on its website.
Wordsworth’s manuscripts remind us that redrafting is a discipline intrinsic to the practice of writing. They show us that a messy page is a necessary step on the way to the clean page readers will encounter once the printers have done their work.  The illusion of looking over Wordsworth’s shoulder as he writes domesticates the words and brings them within our reach.
The children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson, talking in the ‘Times Educational Supplement‘ about why children fail to see classic authors as real people, expresses her surprise at seeing Jane Austen’s manuscripts from the British Library collection ’all scratched out and corrected’. Previously, she had thought of Jane Austen’s work as neat.  How are your perceptions of writers whose work you know well changed by seeing the author’s revisions to their original drafts?
Many of the British Library collection’s themes are fictional genres: childhood and children’s literature, crime and crime fiction, visions of the future. The crime writer interested in the reporting of murders in the Victorian era can see the animated illustrations depicting the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes in Whitechapel in the ‘Illustrated Police News‘ of 6 October 1888. The writer of historical fiction can browse among 61 broadsides, 61 advertisements, 22 chapbooks, 27 playbills and 16 penny dreadfuls to experience some of the ways in which text was presented to the 19th century reader.
The British Library collection is a seemingly bottomless digital pit for researching period detail, fact-checking and gathering inspiration and ideas. As the collection can be searched by theme, creator and format, much of the time-consuming leg-work that past generations of writers have relied on – trekking to specialist libraries, poring over catalogues, photocopying awkwardly shaped documents– has already been done.  What other online resources do you draw on as creative writing students? Over to readers and writers to make of them what they will.


Posted by author: Elizabeth Underwood

One thought on “I wandered like a lonely

  • Good to be reminded that the writer has to re-think and redraft. And of course as far as Wordsworth (William) is concerned, we have to remember that the source for many of his poems was Wordsworth (Dorothy) in her journal. I think she wrote about the daffodils before he did.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

> Next Post Eleanor Quinn

< Previous Post Genre Fiction Strikes Back

Back to blog listings