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Please can anyone help me. I am doing some research on Woerdsworth but am getting stuck on locations he lived, wrote and played in abroad.
Do you know
1. Where he went on his walking tour of France and Switzerland in 1790
2. Where he met and married (or not) Annette Vallon in France
3. Where he went in Germany with Coleridge in 98/99
4. Where he lived in Cambridge.
Any help or directing would be appreciated.
Ric
Ric: Wordsworth sailed from Dover to Calais on 13 July 1790. He went with a Welshman, Robert Jones. They avoided Paris, toured Burgundy and sailed down the Saone river. From Lyons they walked to the Monastery of the Grand Chartreuse and on to Mont Blanc and Chamonix, crossing the Swiss Alps by the Simplon Pass. Then it was on to Lake Como. At Basle, they bought a small boat and went down the Rhine, to Cologne. They then walked through Belgium to Calais, and were back in Cambridge by the middle of October 1790. It was when WW went to France for the second time, in November 1791, that he met Annette Vallon, in Orleans. He never married her, although he intended to. He went to Hamburg with Coleridge in '99, but parted and spent much time with his sister Dorothy in Goslar, in the Harz mountains. At Cambridge WW lived in St John's College, for a time in a room that overlooked Trinity College Chapel, through a window of which he could see Roubiliac's statue of Newton, the source for the lines "The marble index of a mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone."
Wordsworth himself answers all of your questions, except about Vallon, in The Prelude; I took all the info above from a useful book with wonderful illustrations called WORDSWORTH and his World, by F.E. Halliday, Viking Press, New York, 1970.