SOURCE: Woof, Pamela. “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Pleasures of Recognition: An Approach to the Travel Journals.” The Wordsworth Circle 22, no. 3 (summer 1991): 150-160.

In the following excerpt, Woof praises Wordsworth's journals for their “humanness” and unique expressions of pleasure.

Journals we shall have in number sufficient to fill a Lady's bookshelf,—for all, except my Brother, write a Journal.

(MY, II, 625)

So Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson at the beginning of the Continental Tour on July 23, 1820. A shelf-full of Journals! And Wordsworth, though he refrained from a Journal, produced more poems than for the Scottish Recollections of 1803. Further Journals were written in 1822 for the second Scottish Tour. And there were letters; these have an immediacy not quite allowed to the Journals. Here, for instance, is Mary Wordsworth's personal fear when left alone “under a great waterfall amongst the hills … If any one should come near me and I was...