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
Lake Poets the Lakes (apart from Wordsworth). "For the most part other Romantic poets either struggle with a Lake Poet identity or come to define themselves against what the Lakes seem to offer in poetic terms." For Wordsworth, who settled at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, with his sister Dorothy after some years of wandering, the Lakes became bound up with his identity as a poet. Born and brought up on the fringes of the Lake District (at Cockermouth and Penrith), Wordsworth came back to the area in December 1799 and settled into a 'poetic retirement' within his 'native mountains.' Although Wordsworth did not