Previous Exhibitions - Romantic Poets, Romantic Places
Romantic Poets, Romantic Places
25 October 2009 - 13 June 2010
Discover how the homes of Britain's greatest writers became literary shrines.
People have always been fascinated by the homes of great writers. The houses where they lived and died, where they wrote their poems and novels, have been places of pilgrimage for centuries. In the seventeenth century the writer John Aubrey noted how admirers of John Milton would travel to London, often from abroad, to 'see the house & chamber where he was borne'. William 
and Dorothy Wordsworth made a point of seeing Robert Burns's house in Dumfries on their tour of Scotland in 1803. In 1817 John Keats visited Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon, and a year later Burns's birthplace in Alloway. They were still private houses, but their occupants were willing to show visitors around. In the early nineteenth century the eccentric tenant of Shakespeare's birthplace, Mrs Hornby, would even show visitors her bizarre collection of Shakespearean relics.
In 1847 Shakespeare's birthplace came up for sale. Like many writers' houses it was in a poor state of repair, and a public appeal was launched to secure its future. It was the first poet's house to 
be purchased as a national memorial. The second was Milton's cottage in Chalfont St Giles, which was acquired in 1887. Dove Cottage, opened to the public in 1891, was the third.
To coincide with a new publication on the history Dove Cottage, this exhibition looks first of all at these three writers' houses, and then at some of the homes that were lived in by Wordsworth's contemporaries, and which subsequently were opened to the public and held in trust as important parts of this country's national heritage. Sometimes, as in the case of Coleridge's cottage and Keats's house, they were purchased after an international appeal. Others, such as William Cowper's house in Olney, or the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, were purchased for the town by a local philanthropist. Newstead Abbey, Byron's ancestral home, was presented to the county of Nottinghamshire by its owner.
The public acquisition of a poet's home is not just a thing of the past. John Clare's Northamptonshire cottage, for example, was opened as recently as 2009. Writers' houses continue to be a destination, as Stopford Brooke wrote of Dove Cottage in 1890, 'for the eternal possession of those who love English poetry all over the world'.
