William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, into a comfortable middleclass family with roots firmly planted in the Lake Country. His father, John Wordsworth, was legal agent to wealthy landowners, the Lowthers; his mother, Ann Cookson Wordsworth, came to the marriage from a conventionally respectable merchant family in Penrith. Wordsworth was the second child of five: Richard (who became an attorney); William; Dorothy (the poet's lifelong friend and companion); John (a sailor who drowned at sea in 1805); Christopher (who became master of Trinity College, Cambridge). Wordsworth did not leave many descriptions of his parents, but it is assumed that he and his siblings enjoyed a secure early life in Cockermouth, where they lived in a large, attractive house owned by the Lowthers. Although often away from home on business, John Wordsworth took time when home to introduce his children to English poetry and encouraged William to memorize long passages from the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser, a skill that he would treasure both as an allusive poet and as one who composed his own poetry from memory.
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