Abstract
In the Fenwick notes, Wordsworth claimed that the poem published as Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse (1819) had been ‘Founded upon an anecdote, which I read in a newspaper, of an ass being found hanging his head over a canal in a wretched posture. Upon examination a dead body was found in the water and proved to be the body of its master’.1 The anecdote first appeared in the weekly newspaper Aris’s Birmingham Gazette on Monday October 10 1796 in the newspaper’s regular section devoted to regional news from Birmingham and its surrounding area (although this section occasionally included stories taken from other provincial newspapers). It reads as follows: On Friday morning a man by the name of Kirby, was found drowned in the Worcester Canal, near this town. He is supposed to have been intoxicated, and to have missed his road. His ass was the means of discovering him; as the animal, though repeatedly driven from the bank of the canal, continually returned to the spot, until the body was seen and taken out of the water.2
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