What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro
ten days before the ceremony was scheduled to take place. Dorothy took note of the garden, with its asters and sweet peas, and reported, not very convincingly, “I looked at everything with tranquillity & happiness.” The next day she fell sick and remained sick right up until the morning of the wedding when, she wrote, she woke up feeling “fresh & well.” Just before he left for the church, William came upstairs to see her. “I gave him the wedding ring—with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before—he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently.” There is some debate about Dorothy’s exact wording here. In her definitive edition of the Grasmere Journal, the Wordsworth scholar Pamela Woof points out that the wedding-ring passage has been heavily inked over, probably by Dorothy. Examined under infrared light the words are fairly legible, and Woof believes that instead of “and blessed me fervently” Dorothy may have written “as I blessed the ring softly.”
Fervently, or perhaps not, then, William went off to the ceremony, while Dorothy stayed behind in her room, fighting off her agitation. “I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing or seeing anything.” Mary’s sister, who had been downstairs preparing the wedding breakfast, came up to tell her that the newlyweds were approaching the house, and Dorothy swam back to consciousness. “I moved I knew not how straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me till I met my beloved William & fell upon his bosom.” With the help of one of Mary’s brothers, William got Dorothy back into the house, “& there I stayed to welcome my dear Mary.”
After breakfast, all three departed on a wedding trip home to Grasmere. Dorothy filled page after page of the Journal with details of their sightseeing—“Dear Mary had never seen a ruined Abbey before except Whitby”—and wrote with passion about how her own heart “melted away” as they neared Grasmere, traveling through a landscape she had first encountered with William three years earlier. Only upon reaching home did she suddenly fall silent. “I cannot describe what I felt, & our dear Mary’s feelings would I dare say not be easy to speak of.”
In the weeks following their return Dorothy recorded several cozy scenes. She and Mary baked cakes and had all the neighbors in for tea; Mary read Chaucer aloud one cold day; the three of them went off on their usual rambles. But Dove Cottage was not an ideal home for newlyweds plus one. Everything was audible everywhere, and William worried that the noises of lovemaking were distressing to Dorothy. She never made so much as an oblique reference to any such tensions, but as the months passed she seemed to lose her zeal for the Journal, and by January she was writing hardly at all. On January 11 she took note of the date—“Again I have neglected to write my Journal”—recognizing how thoroughly she had fallen away from the practice of daily observation and note taking. From that day forward, she resolved, she would write more regularly, and she would even try to improve her handwriting. It was a new year and a new life, she was determined to make the best of both, and she would open a “nice” clean notebook as soon as the current one was full.
It never happened. Less than a week later, she made what would be the last entry in the Grasmere Journal. “Intensely cold,” she began. “Wm had a fancy for some ginger-bread.” She went on to describe how she had bundled up and gone to visit Matthew Newton, the blind man who sold gingerbread from his house. William liked thick pieces of gingerbread, but Matthew Newton had none that day, only the thinner sort, baked in slabs. She decided to make her own instead but couldn’t bring herself to tell this to Matthew and bought sixpence’ worth of the slabs just to be charitable. The next day, while she was baking, his wife appeared at the door—she had managed to obtain a supply of thick gingerbread. Dorothy felt obliged to buy some, despite the fact that her own was under way, and took two pennies’ worth. She always enjoyed telling stories about their encounters with the locals, and this one had a mix of generosity and misunderstanding that appealed to her. She also liked what Matthew Newton said about trying to obtain more thick gingerbread for her and transcribed his exact phrase: “‘We’ll endeavour to get some.’” The next day she opened the notebook and started to write the date—Monday, January 17—but something distracted her and she put down her pen even before finishing the word. The Journal ends, disconcertingly, with “Monda.”
Dorothy continued cooking, of course, even when she wasn’t writing about it. But the emotional ingredients that went into each meal changed, now that she was no longer the only woman who broiled a steak for William or gathered the scraps of leftover dough to make him a wee tart. The domestic center of gravity in Dove Cottage shifted to Mary. Talented cook, efficient housekeeper, diligent copier of William’s drafts—she could do everything Dorothy was doing and quickly topped her maiden sister-in-law by becoming a mother. John was born eight months after the wedding, Dora a year later, then Thomas, Catharine, and finally William Jr.
Now we come to the second act of Dorothy’s food story, which unfolds during the winter of 1828–1829. By this time she had been the all-purpose spinster in the Wordsworth family for a quarter century, and what was once a hectic round of domestic responsibilities had largely disappeared. William had become prosperous, and the family was living in one of the grandest houses in the area: Rydal Mount, just down the road from Grasmere. Servants took care of the spacious, well-appointed rooms; there was a full-time cook; the children had grown up. At fifty-six, Dorothy was as energetic as ever, but she was no longer crucial to the smooth running of the household, and when she spied a sudden opportunity to be useful again, she snatched it. Her favorite nephew, John Wordsworth, was about to start his first job in the church: he was going to be the curate in a poor Leicestershire village called Whitwick. William couldn’t hear the name without a groan—“There are not many places with fewer attractions or recommendations than Whitwick”—but Dorothy was elated. She would spend the winter there, a “fireside companion” to brighten his home and make the evenings less lonely. It would be Dove Cottage all over again. She wouldn’t have William across from her at the table, but she would have his eldest son, a perfectly good surrogate. John even had trouble with his eyes, as William did, and couldn’t read very long by candlelight. He needed help, he needed conversation, he needed support in his new endeavor. Dorothy would be indispensable.
According to an early nineteenth-century description of Whitwick, the village was set “in a sharp and cold situation” and had no pleasant features worth noting apart from nearby Charnwood Forest and a trout stream. The main source of employment among the villagers was framework knitting, an industry that produced stockings and was so notorious for low wages that the expression “poor as a stockinger” had been a familiar one for decades. The work was done on huge knitting machines, which families kept in their cottages, running them all day and, if they could afford the candles, into the night. John’s parish also included the neighboring village of Swanington, which had been given over to coal mining for the last two hundred years. Poverty and a grim physical landscape were the most prominent features of Dorothy’s new surroundings.
A handful of Dorothy’s letters survive from the winter of 1828–1829; but more important, she was also keeping a diary. She had started it four years earlier, an irregular record of her walks, travels, visitors, and household activities, quite different from the expansive, emotional conversation with herself she had carried on in the pages of the Grasmere Journal. This time it was as if she simply wanted to gather up whatever scraps of the day had fallen like dry leaves across her memory. So she remarked on an encounter with a villager, an arresting view, a round of laundry, a visit to a neighbor. Her style was nondescript, the