Canals, Castles and Catholics: Dora Wordsworth’s Continental Journal of 1828

Like many talented women of her day, Dora Wordsworth (1804-47) has been remembered – if at all – in connection with an illustrious male relation. However, she possessed drive and imagination of her own and a determination to grasp every opportunity that presented itself. Thus it came about that she made a six-week tour through the Low Countries and the Rhineland in the summer of 1828 in the company of her father and his friend and fellow-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Though often exhausted by the heat, arduous journeys and intensive sight-seeing, Dora kept a lively daily record of their experiences, describing both the high points of the tour and her own setbacks and disappointments in a manner designed to entertain her family. Her manuscript journal, in the collection of the Wordsworth Trust since 1935, is published here in its entirety for the first time, complemented by associated material and a wealth of contemporary illustrations. Almost two hundred years after the tour Dora’s vivid snapshots of travel through some of the most famous and scenic areas of northern Europe still retain their clarity and charm; they will linger long in the minds of her modern readers.