Unprepossessing and tattered from use, the small, black-covered notebook which contains the earliest known version of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) great autobiographical poem The Prelude is a manuscript that speaks to the imagination. One of the prized treasures of The Wordsworth Museum at Dove Cottage, Grasmere (DC MS 19), the notebook was a cheap, ordinary, ephemeral affair; and despite being designated “Diaries”, written on a paper label on the front cover, its original intended use was to be merely practical. So why was it so significant that it was worth preserving?
History
School
The Arts, English and Drama
Department
English and Drama
Published in
Manuscript of the Month
Citation
VAN MIERLO, W., 2014. Creativity on the manuscript page: William Wordsworth’s Diaries Notebook (DC MS 19). Manuscript of the Month, 02/2014
Publisher
Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), Universität Hamburg
Version
AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2014
Notes
This paper is available online at: https://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/mom/2014_02_mom_e.html