Goose Quills and Best Philosophers: Introducing Fifth-grade Students to Wordsworth, Poetry, and the Wordsworth Trust Archive

Introduction

We spent a combined 4 hours with the two classes, introducing students briefly to William Wordsworth’s life in England’s Lake District, showing students maps and photos of the region, including pictures of Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage home from 1800 to 1808, and engaging the students in some preliminary forensic work on a photostat of a letter to Wordsworth from his wife, Mary, which had been generously provided by the curatorial staff at the Wordsworth Trust. Katelynn did the heavy lifting in arranging our contacts and background clearances with Barrón, planning dates with Ms. Walker’s classes and drafting an informative and visually appealing PowerPoint presentation; I took the lead in presenting our planned activities to the students.

We, of course, could not predict in advance how interested the students might be in the historical and material aspects of late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century writing to which we introduced them, but the pupils in both classes surpassed our expectations: they were eager and engaged, asking astute questions and drawing sharp inferences about the 200-year-old source text we provided.

The students in fact proved the truth of William Wordsworth’s characterization of children in his “Ode [Intimations of Immortality]” as the world’s “best Philosopher[s]”—“yet glorious in the might / Of untam’d pleasures”!


Photo courtesy of Rosalinda Walker

Epistolary Detective Work: Making Sense of an 1810 Artifact

After talking a bit about William Wordsworth’s life in and poetic responses to England’s Lake District, we presented the students with a pre-folded version of the 1810 letter from Mary Wordsworth to her husband, which the Wordsworth Trust has brilliantly packaged as the facing page of a brochure (one side is the actual-sized photostat of the letter, the other an informative overview of the Trust’s archival collection, educational programs, and research services).  When properly creased along the original fold lines, the brochure appears as the original letter would have looked upon delivery in 1810 with the address clearly visible; unfolded, the letter presents a single sheet of paper, closely written over every available surface:

          
Photos courtesy of Tom Schmid

The students were fascinated by all the questions such a document raises:

• Why is there no envelope?
• How did Mary Wordsworth write the original and fold it into the neatly addressed packet for mailing?
• Why did Mary write so closely over every available space of the page?
• Why is there no stamp?
• How was the original letter sealed?
• What are the light pencil marks, which look like a date, doing in the upper corner of the address block?
• How did the large ink blots on the upper portion of the unfolded letter get there?

Katelynn and I were highly gratified with the students’ energetic questioning, along with their very smart answers and theories. We gave a flat, unfolded copy of the Trust brochure/letter to each student and showed them how to fold it into the closed letter. We talked about the expense of paper in the early nineteenth century and the fact that to economize, letter writers would use all of the available space on a single sheet of foolscap (paper that often has the dimension of 13  X 8 inches) that they could, while folding and sealing the final product to eliminate the need for an envelope; we challenged the students to find where the letter actually starts, and the students themselves located the faint traces of the original wax seal; the students also speculated that the light pencil date must have been added by someone else much later . . . perhaps an archivist cataloguing the letter for the Trust collection.

All of this detective work gave the students a felt sense of the materiality of writing in Wordsworth’s day—its labor-intensive and time-consuming requirements—along with a glimpse into the layered stories such an historical document tells. We talked about the contrast between texting, calling, or emailing a friend or loved one today, with all the immediacy that such communications provide, and the care and expense of writing on paper and having to wait days—possibly weeks—for a reply. The students were highly interested in the historical differences among these media and were keen to experience the challenges of writing as Wordsworth’s contemporaries did.

Goose Quills and Messy Ink

After working with the Mary Wordsworth letter, we handed out sheets of blank legal-sized paper (the closest to foolscap in size) so that students could experience writing their own letters. We went through the identical folding routine we had done with the finished Wordsworth letter and had the students pre-address their sheets to Jeff Cowton, Curator and Head of Education at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. That done, we handed out practice paper and had the students practice writing with goose quill pens, cut to exacting late eighteenth-century standards by a scholar and artisan in Minnesota. We also provided store-bought fountain pen ink, though we talked about Dorothy Wordsworth’s 200-year-old recipe for making her own ink (again, to save expense) and promised students that we would try to gather the materials (oak gall, iron sulfite, etc.) to make ink on our next visit.

Writing with authentic quills was the most fun activity of the day for the students and for us. We all bemoaned and laughed over the sheer difficulty in creating a smooth and even line with a quill, and we marveled anew at the regularity of Mary Wordsworth’s lines in her letter. The students were also immediately struck with the realities of real-time composition with a quill and ink: how often the nib must be continuously dipped and how the process of writing and dipping necessitates pausing as one writes, giving the writer time to think between words—or to lose track of the thought she had been pursuing! And everyone could see now how those ink blots might have accidentally marred the page of Mary’s letter!

     
Photos courtesy of Rosalinda Walker

The Poetry of People and Place

Our main purpose in teaching Wordsworth in the El Paso schools is to highlight a particular approach to external nature, to relationships with others, and to self-development that Wordsworth’s poetry defines and that, from a humanistic perspective, can still be of great value to a meaningful life in society today. So, for the students’ letters, we had them write (in pencil, to make the writing itself a little easier) a six-line poem based on Wordsworthian principles of highlighting the important things in our lives that we often take for granted or that we ignore through their very familiarity to us—through our habitual viewing of the world in terms of what Wordsworth called our “pre-established codes of decision.” Each line of the poem needed, then, to provide information on specific aspects of the writer’s life:

• Items found in each writer’s home
• Items found in each writer’s yard
• Items found in each writer’s neighborhood
• Names of the writer’s relatives
• Names of food and dishes that recall family gatherings
• Names of places the writer keeps childhood memories

We encouraged the students to think imagistically and metaphorically rather than just in terms of lists, and the students responded with some beautifully creative lines about the people and places and things that help define their lives.

Each poem was folded into a nineteenth-century style letter, addressed to Jeff Cowton, and sealed with traditional sealing wax and stamped with a “W” – for “Wordsworth,” of course! The sealing process, which involved flame, melting wax, and an ornate brass stamp (all provided thanks to Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP Program Manager Vincent Martinez), was also a huge hit with the students.We collected all the letters, and the next day I sent them all to Jeff Cowton in Grasmere. We’re looking forward to hearing back from him, and we have planned a Skype call with Jeff and the students for our next activity—a true blending of old technologies with new and a nice way to link El Paso with northern England.


Photo courtesy Tom Schmid

Katelynn, Ms. Walker, and I believe the students both enjoyed the activities of the day and learned a lot about the process of writing in Wordsworth’s day. We very much look forward to our next workshop with the students at Barrón, now scheduled for May 8, when we plan to look more deeply into Wordsworth’s poetry, especially poems about the people in his life and their collective associations with the places that mattered most to them all: Dove Cottage, its garden, and the mountains, forests, lakes, and streams that surrounded the Wordsworth home in Grasmere and that constituted what Wordsworth characterized as:

A termination, and a last retreat,
A Centre, come from wheresoe’er you will,
A Whole, without dependence or defect,
Made for itself, and happy in itself,
Perfect Contentment, Unity entire.


Photo courtesy of Tom Schmid

Written by Dr. Thomas Schmid
Faculty Fellow, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP