Wordsworth the Poet Laureate: The Grand Old Man of Rydal

In 1843, at the age of 73, William Wordsworth became Poet Laureate of England – and promptly set a record that still stands: he is the only Laureate never to write a single line of official verse. The appointment crowned one of literature's great third acts, in which the mocked radical experimenter of 1798 lived long enough to become the age's revered sage – consulted, painted, honoured, and visited at Rydal Mount by a procession of pilgrims from two continents. The later Wordsworth is easy to caricature and better to understand; his last decades shaped the Lake District's future as much as his poems shaped its image. Here is the story of the Laureate years – honours, fights, sorrows and all.

From laughing-stock to institution

It is worth remembering how far the old man had climbed. Lyrical Ballads and its successors were savaged for decades – the Edinburgh Review's critic greeted his long poem The Excursion in 1814 with the most famous put-down in English criticism: "This will never do" – and well into middle age Wordsworth was a byword for provincial eccentricity, his sales dwarfed by fashionable Byron and Scott. The tide turned through the 1820s and 1830s as a generation raised on his poems reached adulthood: honorary degrees arrived (Oxford's, in 1839, brought an ovation), a Civil List pension followed in 1842, and when his friend and Keswick neighbour Robert Southey died in 1843, the Laureateship was offered. Wordsworth initially declined – he was too old, he protested, for the duties – and accepted only when assured, from the top, that nothing would ever be required of him. Nothing ever was: seven years of perfectly silent laureateship, punctuated by a single splendid comedy in 1845, when the old poet attended the royal ball in borrowed court dress – the sword and breeches of the elderly Samuel Rogers – to bow to the young Queen Victoria.

The day job: stamps, not stanzas

Visitors are often startled to learn how the great poet actually paid his bills: from 1813 Wordsworth held the government post of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland – collector of revenue duties – run from an office in Ambleside whose building, still called the Old Stamp House, now houses a celebrated restaurant trading proudly under the name. Radical friends grumbled that the one-time revolutionary had taken the establishment's shilling; Wordsworth, with a household to feed on poetry that did not yet sell, took the shilling and kept writing. The post, the pension and finally the Laureateship trace the same arc – the outsider becoming, room by room, the nation's furniture.

The Rydal Mount court

Through these decades Rydal Mount functioned as a kind of informal national shrine with the deity in residence. The visitors' procession was extraordinary: Ralph Waldo Emerson came from America (twice, in 1833 and 1848) and recorded the encounters; young Tennyson, Matthew Arnold from neighbouring Fox How, John Stuart Mill – whose famous testimony that Wordsworth's poems cured his youthful breakdown is the era's best review – and hundreds of unannounced admirers who simply walked up the hill hoping for a glimpse. They usually got one: the old poet was proud of his garden terraces (he maintained the grounds were his true study, and composed pacing them, booming lines aloud) and would tour strangers round with gruff hospitality. The picture has its shadows – the reactionary opinions hardening, the sublime egotism his juniors giggled at – and its griefs, above all the death of his daughter Dora in 1847, which broke his heart and silenced his pen for good. But the household held: Mary steady at its centre, Dorothy cared for through her long twilight, the terraces walked daily to the end.

The last fight: Wordsworth versus the railway

The Laureate's final public campaign still echoes. In 1844 promoters planned a railway from Kendal into the district's heart at Windermere, and Wordsworth – the man whose Guide to the Lakes had invited the world in – erupted in protest: letters to the Morning Post and a sonnet whose opening cry, asking whether no nook of English ground was secure from "rash assault", became the motto of landscape defence forever after. Critics then and now note the awkwardness – the prophet of nature for all, rationing access – but his core argument, that fragile places need protecting even from their admirers, seeded everything from the National Trust (founded partly by his devoted reader Canon Rawnsley) to the National Park of 1951 and the region's UNESCO World Heritage inscription in 2017. The railway, incidentally, was halted short of the lakeshore – its terminus became Windermere town, where many of our guests arrive today, completing an irony the old man would have relished bitterly. The story of poet-as-conservationist is told at wordsworth.org.uk, and the landscape's protected status today at lakedistrict.gov.uk.

April 1850: the quiet exit

Wordsworth caught pleurisy after a spring walk and died at Rydal Mount on 23 April 1850 – St George's Day, Shakespeare's date – aged 80. The nation expected Westminster Abbey; the poet had chosen Grasmere churchyard, under his own yews. Within months Mary gave the world his real memorial, publishing the lifelong autobiographical poem under her chosen title: The Prelude. The timing has a poetry of its own – the great confession of how the mind was made, appearing only when the man was safely beyond embarrassment.

Meeting the old lion on home ground

The Laureate years live all along our touring route: the Stamp Office in Ambleside, the closed-for-now Mount above Rydal, Dora's golden field below it, the churchyard at Grasmere. On our small-group Wordsworth tours from Windermere and Ambleside – maximum seven guests – the whole arc is told in place: rebel to institution, "This will never do" to national treasure, ending under the yews he planted for himself. Seven silent years as Laureate, and the most eloquent retirement in English letters. We drive through it daily, and it has never once grown stale.

This article is part of our Wordsworth guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.