About This Edition

Poems from the Commonplace Book is part of Dorothy Wordsworth's Lake District, a Romantic Circles Edition, dedicated to recovering one of the most distinctive voices of Romantic-era literature: Dorothy Wordsworth was the author of extraordinary journals, poems, narratives, letters, and natural descriptions. This edition celebrates her work as a literary guide to the English Lake District. It offers access to works from across her career, all newly edited from manuscripts, extensively annotated, and situated within their original material formats and circumstances of composition. 

About the Editor of Poems from the Commonplace Book

Michelle Levy is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She has published extensively on women’s literary history and women authors of the Romantic period, including Jane Austen, Anna Barbauld, Mary Shelley, and Dorothy Wordsworth, as well as on book history and digital humanities. Dr. Levy is the author of Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Palgrave, 2008), coeditor of The Broadview Reader in Book History (2014), and coauthor of The Broadview Introduction to Book History (2017), both with Tom Mole. Her most recent books are Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain (Edinburgh, 2020), and with Betty Schellenberg in the Cambridge University Press Elements series, How and Why to Do Things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts (2021). Paul Westover and Nicholas Mason provided critical support at every stage for this section of the edition of Dorothy Wordsworth's poetry as found in DCMS 120.

About the Design and Markup

This edition was TEI-encoded by Jessica Tebo, Lavender Earnest, and Emily Stephens. The banner image for this volume is from [17] [Irregular Verses] [Version B of “To Julia Marshall—A Fragment”], f.39v and f.40r.

Laura Mandell and Dave Rettenmaier developed the modified versions of the transforms provided by the TEI that were used to convert the TEI files into HTML. TEI renders text archival quality for better preservation and future access.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Romantic Circles editors, past and present, who have supported this project, and above all to Michele Speitz, current editor of electronic editions, for her energetic investment over a number of years. We also wish to express our sincere gratitude to the University of Colorado Boulder team; we are thankful for the support and resources Thora Brylowe has devoted to the extensive development work and coding that had to be done on this edition. Jessica Tebo has been involved as a technical editor from the start and has done exceptional work in bringing our vision of Dorothy's manuscript writing to life. This project would not exist without their tireless efforts.

Like many researchers in the field of Romantic studies, we owe profound thanks to the Wordsworth Trust, which owns over 90 percent of the extant manuscripts of Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Jeff Cowton, MBE, Principal Curator and Head of Learning, has provided access to priceless materials, advised us, and encouraged us at all stages of this project. Other friends at the Trust who have lent crucial support to us and our students include Melissa Mitchell-Gorman and Rebecca Turner. We are also grateful to Michael McGregor, the Robert Woof Director, along with all of the trustees for granting us permission to reproduce numerous manuscript pages and illustrations in this edition, including all of the pages in DCMS 120 featuring Dorothy's original poetry.

In the latter stages of this project, Sara Penn and Salena Wiener assisted with checking transcriptions of the poetry. This project has been going on for at least a decade, and students from Simon Fraser University who have worked on transcriptions and early versions of the encoding include Britney Burrell, Lindsey Seatter, and Emily Seitz.

Finally, we are indebted to Dorothy Wordsworth’s previous editors, particularly Susan Levin's recovery and editing of the poetry. Her foundational work has paved the way for this edition and done an invaluable service in bringing Wordsworth’s poetry to academic and public audiences. 

Dorothy Wordsworth's Lake District by Michelle Levy, Nicholas Mason, Paul Westover, Romantic Circles, and the University of Colorado is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0