An Interchange of Knowledge and Delight

An exploration of the fascinating 25 year long discourse between William Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont about many different aspects of creativity and culture.

Wordsworth is more often associated with rural folk and the Lakeland fells than with polite society and picture galleries but he described his friendship with Sir George Beaumont as one of the ‘blessings’ of his life. Beaumont was an artist, patron, and co-founder of the National Gallery; for almost twenty-five years, he and Wordsworth exchanged ideas about poetry, painting, exhibitions, the theatre, and gardening. This talk will explore some of the ways they influenced each other and introduce paintings Beaumont produced to accompany Wordsworth’s poetry.

Jessica Fay is the editor of The Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to William and Dorothy Wordsworth (2021) and author of Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community (2018). She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and currently teaches English Literature at the University of Birmingham.