Wordsworth Trust associations, personal, literary and moral, which gather around this cottage". As well as Dorothy Wordsworth, these associations included Thomas De Quincey (who himself had the tenancy of Dove Cottage between 1809 and 1835), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Humphry Davy and Sir George Beaumont. The Wordsworth Trust’s collection contains over 90% of Wordsworth’s verse manuscripts, and the largest collection of working papers, letters and other manuscript material relating to Wordsworth and his family anywhere in the world. It includes each of the 23 surviving manuscript versions of The Prelude, and all of the surviving notebooks in
The Spirit of the Age in British society. He was befriended in his early years by the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who at that time shared his radical thinking, and soon he entered the circle of reformist philosopher William Godwin. His brother John was also responsible for helping him connect with other like-minded souls, leading him to the center of London intellectual culture, where he met others who, years later, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Godwin, would be brought to life in this book, particularly Charles Lamb and, some time afterward, Leigh Hunt. Although Hazlitt had aimed at a career in philosophy, he was unable