Wordsworth's ‘colonial links' investigated using taxpayers' money

Telegraph

18-06-2025

Taxpayers' money has been used to investigate 'colonial links' at William Wordsworth 's cottage.
His former Lake District home, Dove Cottage in Grasmere, is now operated as a museum dedicated to the poet's literacy legacy.
This legacy has been examined for 'slavery and East India Company histories' as part of a wider effort to alter how Romantic writers are presented.
The publicly funded project aimed to address the 'silence and inaction' over Wordsworth's imperial associations at Dove Cottage, which annually attracts around 70,000 visitors.
Wordsworth's brother, John, worked for the East India Company and died in the wreck of one of its ships.
The colonial research project was carried out in partnership with the Wordsworth Trust, which runs the cottage museum, and Prof Simon Bainbridge, a trustee and academic at the University of Lancaster.
A grant of £35,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a funding quango, was intended to support efforts to highlight the colonial links of famous British writers.
The former homes – now museums – of some of Britain's greatest poets, including John Keats, Lord Byron and Samuel-Taylor Coleridge, also collaborated in the decolonising project.
Another of Wordsworth's properties in Cockermouth and the home of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet, were also included in the project, which aimed to 'investigate the colonial links of Romantic-period literary house museums'.
The network of literary attractions aimed to build on this investigation, moving on to devise ways to present potential colonial links to 'a wider public'.
None of the writers had any direct personal involvement with colonisation or the slave trade, apart from Wordsworth, who may have gained from his brother's financial ventures.
He did, however, write abolitionist poetry and called abolition an 'enterprise sublime'.
Burns sought work on Caribbean plantation as an impoverished young man, before changing his mind, and Byron's aristocratic wealth appears not to have been derived from slavery.
Keats was from a humble background and was dead by 25, while Wordsworth's close friend and collaborator, Coleridge, frequently wrote in support of abolition as a young man.
The project outline on the AHRC website acknowledged that 'because literary figures inspire reverence and widespread public respect' efforts to link them to colonial wrongdoing often provoked 'public and media hostility'.
However, the project, which officially ended in 2024, set out to reveal how the Romantic period's 'literary house museums bear (witness) to colonialism in numerous ways' which 'frequently remain unexplored or untold'.
The project sought to create resources for literary museum staff to examine and explain colonial links to the public, but this was abandoned.
Prof Bainbridge said: 'The network ultimately decided against creating general resources for writers' house museums to address the issues discussed.
'The issues proved too complex to produce such group resources; rather, the emphasis as the network developed was on museums reflecting on the issues discussed in relation to their own specific contexts.
'The museums are committed to resourcing public knowledge about the past, including on this topic.'
He added: 'The issues and ideas discussed may inform the work of the Wordsworth Trust going forward but this will be a matter for their own future reflection.'
The re-examination of the Romantics comes following a broader drive to present the colonial connections of famous figures, particularly following Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, which has dragged writers into frequent rows.
In 2021, the National Trust released an audit of properties linked to colonialism and slavery, which included the Sussex home of Rudyard Kipling, and another Wordsworth property, Allan Bank.
The British Library also undertook work in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests to address any links to slaver y among the literary figures represented in its collection.