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Updated: June 27, 2025
Wordsworth and his sister were settled at Racedown, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. In 1797 they moved to Alfoxden, in Somersetshire, their principal inducement to the change being Coleridge's society. The friendship bore fruit in the production of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, mainly the work of Wordsworth, but containing no less notable a contribution from Coleridge than the Ancient Mariner.
Among the poems written at Alfoxden Peter Bell was prominent, but we hear little of it except from Hazlitt, who, taken over to the Wordsworths by Coleridge from Nether Stowey, was on a first visit permitted to read "the sibylline leaves," and on a second had the rare pleasure of hearing Wordsworth himself chant Peter Bell, in his "equable, sustained, and internal" manner of recitation, under the ash-trees of Alfoxden Park.
On the strength of it he settled first at Racedown in Dorset, and then at Alfoxden in Somerset, in the companionship of his sister Dorothy; and at the second of the two places in the neighbourhood of Coleridge.
He gave the best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercised over him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near Nether Stowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, a change of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded, "our principal inducement was Coleridge's society."
By 1797 a Government spy seems to have been looking after him and his friends: he was living at the time at Alfoxden, near Coleridge, who, in the previous year, had brought out The Watchman to proclaim, as the prospectus said, "the state of the political atmosphere, and preserve Freedom and her Friends from the attacks of Robbers and Assassins."
Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton, and the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine. In the course of this walk was planned the poem of the Ancient Mariner, founded on a dream, as Mr.
The probability is that he arrived in England early in July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and proper thing to be done under the circumstances namely, returned to his wife and children at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next two months, after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at Alfoxden, to visit the district to which the latter had either already resolved upon, or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode.
It was therefore composed at Alfoxden, that plain stone house in West Somersetshire, which Dorothy and William Wordsworth rented for the sum of £23 for one year, the rent covering the use of "a large park, with seventy head of deer." Thanks partly to its remoteness from a railway, and partly also to the peculiarities of its family history, Alfoxden remains singularly unaltered.
His poems written at Alfoxden are precisely those in which he is most audacious in carrying out his principle, and nothing, even of his, is quite so simple or quite so naked as Peter Bell.
When he became Chancellor of England he revenged himself on the knight, who was Treasurer of the Middle Temple, by forbidding him to quit London without his leave. Wordsworth, William, resided in 1797 at Alfoxden, a house near Holford. For distinguished persons who have resided at Bath, see p. 46. Chiefly derived from the "Dictionary of National Biography."
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