1770 : Birth and parents

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland, son of John Wordsworth, and Ann, née Cookson, of Penrith. He had three brothers, Richard b1768, John b1772 and Christopher b1774 and one sister, Dorothy b1771. His maternal grandparents, the Cooksons, are well-to-do people who run a large drapery store in Penrith town centre. Ann's mother has aristocratic pretensions as a descendant of the Crackanthorpes of Newbiggin Hall. John (William's father) works as an agent and rent collector for Sir James Lowther.

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1770 - 1787: Cockermouth; Penrith and Hawkshead; Childhood and early education

Wordsworth has the misfortune to lose both his parents before the age of thirteen, at which point he comes under the guardianship of his uncles, his father's brother, John Wordsworth of Whitehaven and his mother's brother, William Cookson of Penrith, an arrangement which leads to significant family tensions, especially with the Cooksons. Dorothy later writes to Jane Pollard: each day we do receive fresh insults (Letter, Penrith, summer 1787), insults centering around their being impoverished and dependent on the 'charity' of their grandfather. A large part of this impoverishment is due to the fact that much of Wordsworth's father's estate is tied up in one debt owed by James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, which he refuses to settle. In fact, the debt will only be paid twenty years later on the death of Lowther himself.

Fortunately, he profits from a great deal of freedom to wander far and wide during term-time as a boarder with Ann Tyson at Colthouse nr Hawkshead, and receives an excellent education at Hawkshead Grammar School, winning a sizarship to St John's College, Cambridge in 1787.

He begins composing poetry while still at school, encouraged by headmaster William Taylor.

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1787 - 1790 (17-20): St John's College, Cambridge; a walking tour of the Alps with Robert Jones.

After an initial burst of enthusiasm, he does not take to Cambridge. His status as a 'sizar' marks him out as a hard-up student, and it is probable that his experiences in the Cookson household have left him particularly sensitive to his 'impoverished' status, though it is also true that his general assessment of academic life at Cambridge was not very positive.

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He spends the long vacation of 1790, when he should probably have been swotting for his finals, on a walking tour of the Alps with his fellow student Robert Jones.

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On his return to England, he goes back to Cambridge briefly (candidates were required to reside for the 'greater part' of any term counting towards their degree), then spends six weeks over Christmas 1790 with his sister at uncle William's parsonage in Forncett.

He leaves the University in January 1791 passing his final examinations without distinction, much to the disappointment of his family.

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1791 (21): London; North Wales; London again; departure for France.

February - May: He is now a free man, but is being pressed by his uncles to decide on a career. He goes to London, and spends most of this first sojourn as a tourist (see The Prelude Bk VII, Residence in London).

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June - August: He visits his friend Jones in North Wales. During the course of this visit, he accompanies Jones on a walking tour of the area, and it is probably on this occasion that they complete a nocturnal expedition up Snowdon together, which features in Bk XIV of The Prelude (1850), (lines 1-60).

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September: He continues to prevaricate with regard to his career, returning to London to explain to his distant relation, John Robinson, an MP and an important member of the government, that he is too young to take up his offer of a curacy.

October: He spends some time in Cambridge.

November - December: He makes his way to Brighton at the end of November, where he makes contact with the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, who gives him introductions to her Girondin friends in Paris and to writer and poet Helen Maria Williams, who is currently in Orléans.

December: He makes the crossing to Dieppe, then proceeds to Paris, where he stays several days, taking the opportunity to do some sightseeing, before leaving for Orléans, where he is disappointed to find that Ms Williams has already left.

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1792 (22): sojourn in France; return to England

December 1791 - April 1792: Whilst in Orléans, he meets Annette Vallon, and they become lovers.

April - September: He follows Annette to the nearby town of Blois, where he makes the acquaintance of Michel de Beaupuis, an officer in the French Revolutionary Army, the only officer he has met since his arrival in France who actually supports the Revolution. Beaupuis leaves Blois in July 1792 with his unit, but not before he has deeply impressed Wordsworth with his idealism, and convinced him of the justice of the Revolutionary cause, despite the increasing violence and disorder in French society.

It is during this period that he composes the long poem Descriptive Sketches, an account of his walking tour of the Alps in 1790.

September - November: He returns to Orléans with Annette, who is now expecting his baby, and begins making plans to return to England to see his two long poems (An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches) through the press, appointing M Dufour, Annette's landlord, to stand in for him at the christening of his child.

December: He returns to England via Paris.

His child, christened Catherine, is born on 15 December 1792 in Orléans.

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1793 (23): London and radical politics, part I; a tour of the West Country, partly with William Calvert; a tour of North Wales in company with his friend Robert Jones; possible further visit to France and peregrinations in Cumberland.

January - April: On his return to England, he negotiates the publication of An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches with the London publisher Joseph Johnson. The works receive mixed reviews over the next few months, and it becomes clear that they are not going to plug the hole in his finances anytime soon.

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The declaration of war by France on England on 1st February further complicates Wordsworth's situation, and a return to France now appears impossible for the time being (or at least both difficult and dangerous).

His uncles take a dim view of his republican politics and his sexual promiscuity, and he is clearly no longer welcome at his uncle William's parsonage in Forncett.

Pursuing his career as a political polemicist, he writes a Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff detailing his republican views, which are substantially a rehash of what Tom Paine has already published in a much more persuasive form as The Rights of Man (1791 and 1792). Wordsworth's Reply remains unfinished and will only be published in 1875.

He has fully informed his sister Dorothy by letter of his affair with Annette, and they have all three entered into correspondence. Annette is clearly expecting to be invited over to England to share in the idyllic country cottage existence already sketched out by Wordsworth with his sister (see Annette's letter to Dorothy, Blois, 20 March 1793). At the same time, unknown to uncle William, unable to meet together at Forncett, William and Dorothy are planning to rendezvous in Halifax.

June - September: He continues to receive a certain allowance from Uncle Richard of Whitehaven, but money is clearly now a pressing problem. Looking to become the companion or tutor to a wealthy young man, Wordsworth hooks up with William Calvert, a former fellow pupil at Hawkshead School, who has recently inherited a modest fortune and who agrees to fund a tour of the West Country. They journey from London to the Isle of Wight in a gig together, and spend a month on the island (see map below, ref 2), then proceed northwest. Unfortunately, the gig is damaged beyond repair in an accident near Salisbury (3), Calvert takes the horse and rides north, while Wordsworth continues his tour alone and on foot, making his way through Bristol (4) and up the Wye Valley to his friend Robert Jones' house in the Vale of Clwyd, North Wales. (5).

It is during this pedestrian tour that he begins the poem Salisbury Plain.

September to December: Little is known of Wordsworth's movements for the rest of this year. One hypothesis is that he again goes over to France, an idea largely based on historian Thomas Carlyle's assertion that Wordsworth told him that he had witnessed the execution of Gorsas in Paris, which occurred on 7 October 1793. At all events, if he did go, it is evident that he soon came back, and did not make it to Orléans.

There is general evidence that, at the end of the year, he spends some time in or around Keswick, probably at or close by Windy Brow, a property belonging to the Calverts, that he stays at his Uncle Richard's house in Whitehaven over Christmas, and that he spends some time at Armathwaite Hall, near Cockermouth, the home of his former school-fellow John Spedding.

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1794 (24): Halifax with Dorothy; Windy Brow with Dorothy; Whitehaven with Dorothy; Windy Brow again, now with Raisley Calvert.

February- April: He succeeds in meeting up with his sister who is staying at the house of William Rawson, the new husband of Dorothy's former foster mother 'Aunt' Threlkeld, in Sowerby Bridge near Halifax, They stay here until early April, then make their way to the Lake District together, partly on foot.

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April - May: They stay together at Windy Brow near Keswick for about six weeks. Raisley Calvert, William Calvert's younger brother, who is ill with tuberculosis, forms a plan to share with Wordsworth half the income from an inheritance he has received, in an altruistic scheme to support him in his efforts to continue working as a poet.

May - June: William and Dorothy next make their way to Whitehaven, where they stay at the house of their cousin John Wordsworth (a sea captain with the East India Company) until mid-June, when William returns alone to Windy Brow to continue his attendance on Raisley Calvert.

June 1794 - January 1795: Apart from four weeks from 20 August 1794, which he spends at Rampside, at the house of Elizabeth, eldest daughter of uncle Richard Wordsworth of Whitehaven, he stays with Raisley Calvert until the latter's death on 9 January 1795. Calvert provides for Wordsworth in his will, bequeathing him £900. Wordsworth later explains:

I had had but little connection [with Raisley Calvert] and the act was done entirely from a confidence on his part that I had powers and attainments which might be of use to mankind. (Wordsworth, Letter to Sir George Beaumont, Grasmere, 20 February 1805)

A labourer's annual wage in 1797 is around £30.

It appears that Annette is completely forgotten.

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1795 (25): Newcastle with Dorothy; London, radical politics part II; Racedown with Dorothy

January: He spends a month or so with his sister Dorothy in Newcastle, where she is staying with one of their mother's cousins.

February - September: He makes his way to London again, where he takes lodgings at 15 Chalton Street, Somers Town. It is probably no accident that William Godwin, celebrated author of Political Justice and Caleb Williams,, is living at number 25. Their first recorded meeting occurs on 27 February 1795 in company with Frend, Holcroft, Losh, Tweddell, and Dyer among others, a group with strong associations to Cambridge and gentlemanly radicalism.

He makes the acquaintance of Basil Montagu, natural son of the fourth Earl of Sandwich by the singer Martha Ray. It is through Montagu that he gets to know the two brothers Pinney, John Frederick and Azariah, from the Bristol area, sons of John Praetor Pinney, owner of large sugar plantations in the West Indies. The Pinney brothers are at the time Montagu's students in law. They offer Wordsworth the use of Racedown Lodge, a substantial house in West Dorset, rent free.

From September: Things are looking up! He suggests to Dorothy that she take the young Basil in hand for £50 per year, and that they set up house together at Racedown. It's a solution that apparently suits everybody, and he makes his way to Bristol towards the end of August, where he stays with the Pinneys, until Dorothy arrives on 22 September. They then make their way with young Basil to Racedown, arriving on 26 September.

Whilst he is in Bristol, he makes the acquaintance of Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who have been lecturing in the city.

Dorothy writes to Jane Marshall (née Pollard): William has had a letter from France since we came. Annette mentions having despatched half a dozen none of which he has received. (letter, Racedown, 30 November 1795)