Dorothy: The Highlights

It’s always risky to buy a second-hand book online, especially when the condition is described as ‘fair’, which embraces a wide variety of possible faults. When Dorothy Wordsworth’s Continental Journals, 1798–1820 (1897) arrived, a quick flick through revealed that the text on many pages had been made hideous by vivid green highlighting. This was annoying but not sufficiently so to make me return the book. In fact I’ve found that annotations can sometimes add to one’s enjoyment, as in the case of a copy of George Borrow’s Lavengro, chosen from the library of an old friend who had recently died. Reading the pencilled annotations in his familiar hand, it was as if I was reading it alongside him, enjoying again his questioning mind and gentle intelligence, bringing him back to life for me for a few hours.

I had no such relationship, however, with the person who had defiled Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals. At first glance there seemed no way of getting to know or even roughly categorize him (or her?) – until, that is, I began to read the text. The first highlighting was over part of Dorothy’s description of her journey through Kent: ‘On as we travel, cherry orchards (this pleasant labour of gathering going on, and baskets of ripe fruit under the trees) . . .’ It was an attractive picture and I expected that my attention would be drawn to other similar passages. But reading on, I soon realized that what interested this reader was not lyrical beauty but simply any mention whatever of food. The second highlighting was, ‘dined at the little town of Ghistelles, egg and bacon and omelet’. And so it continued: almost every meal, beverage and item of food consumed by Dorothy, William and the other members of their party on their tour of 1820 was dutifully highlighted. Even statements such as ‘Drank tea late’, or ‘My dinner was sent up to me from the Table d’hôte’, or ‘They brought us a ponderous teapot that would not pour out the tea’, were picked out. Bizarrely the highlighter completely passed over Dorothy’s feelings of sorrow and horror at the site of the Battle of Waterloo and ignored all her observations on the poverty of the local people, before alighting on: ‘Our dinner was not over plentiful, each dish being cleared before it was withdrawn.’ So curious was this that after a while I found I was becoming more interested in the person doing the highlighting than in the actual writer. Why, I asked myself, had he (or she) totally ignored the tempting fruit in pretty rustic baskets sold in the market in Liège which so appealed to Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth? Was it only food in inns that mattered to him, or had he been dozing and missed this reference? And when I made my way through pages untouched by green – describing Dorothy’s reactions to Alpine scenery and sunrises, for example – I imagined my fellow reader with pen poised, tut-tutting, a little bored, waiting for the next mention of dinner. I must confess that I had come to the Journals with a mission of my own. I am currently researching the subject of people who have crossed the Alps on foot, of whom William Wordsworth was, of course, a pre-eminent example. In The Prelude he describes how in 1790 he and his companion crossed the Alps into Italy without being aware of it at the time. His profound disappointment when he realized this navigational error was the spur for one of the greatest passages in English poetry. In a letter he wrote to the Morning Post in 1845, Wordsworth describes the further dismay he felt when he returned in 1820 and found that the rough mule track along which he had originally walked had been swept away, replaced by a smart new road. I had come to Dorothy’s Journals to see what this moment looked like from her perspective. So while my fellow reader with the green highlighter was scanning the book for references to food, I was scanning it for references to paths and roads. It was like being on a walk with a companion whose sympathies you do not share. While you might point out each church tower glimpsed through the trees, he might draw your attention to the overhead power lines. And as on a walk with an uncongenial companion, I soon became irritated by his behaviour. Why was he so joyless and mechanical? If he was so fascinated by food, couldn’t he have added the odd entertaining or interesting word about it? But most of all I resented him for what he had done to my idea of Dorothy Wordsworth. I had read Dorothy’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, AD 1803 and found it brilliant and fresh, one of the finest travel books. Admittedly, her Journals of her 1820 Continental tour fall short of those heights. But even so, by drawing attention only to Dorothy’s comments about food, she becomes like one of those insufferable reviewers on Tripadvisor who complain about everything: bad smells from the kitchen; poor service; ‘veal hanging for sale, which in England would be thought unfit to be eaten’; ‘bad bread, bad butter, indifferent cheese, sorry peaches, and poor wine’. What intrigued me most, however, was why? What was all this highlighting for? It didn’t seem to be done for pleasure, but was it work? Was it a symptom of the hyper-specialization of academic literary studies? Maybe the highlighter was gathering crumbs of evidence for a thesis on ‘Hospitality in the Romantic Period’ or something similar, and perhaps he had already spoilt a copy of Dorothy’s Highland Journals in the same way, highlighting every bowl of porridge, every boiled sheep’s head, every last turnip. Or could it have been, if I chose to see it that way, a sort of art – like Marcel Duchamp putting a moustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa? The artist Tom Phillips used a Victorian novel – W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document – to create his own, A Humament, transforming the original object into a new artwork of immense originality and wit. Might I see the green lines on my book as an intervention or appropriation designed to subvert or transform Dorothy’s text? In 1977 the artist David Nash made a wooden boulder out of an old oak stump. He rolled it into the River Dwyryd in Wales where it became a ‘free-range sculpture’ carried along by the current, disappearing beneath the waters for many years and then resurfacing when disturbed by flood or storm. Eventually, and probably no one will know when, it will be carried out to sea and disappear forever. Books can have similar lives of appearance and disappearance. When I have finished with my highlighted copy of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Continental Journals, I will take it to a local charity shop, where it may sit unregarded for many years until it is bought by another reader who may find it as infuriating and fascinating as I have. Perhaps, as time passes, it will undergo new accretions and remakings before it rolls out into the great sea of unknowing again.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Tony Hufton 2025