Wordsworth’s Glasses: the Materiality of Blindness in the Romantic Vision

Abstract

Among the memorabilia on display at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, are the green eyeshades that Wordsworth wore to alleviate the symptoms of the eye disorders that accompanied his writing career, and a blue stone thought to be the one used to relieve his eye inflammations. Several unpublished letters in the Wordsworth Trust collection discuss and document the nature and impact of Wordsworth’s eye disorders. From 1805 until his death, throughout the period in which he redrafted major sections of The Prelude, Wordsworth experienced sustained attacks of chronic trachoma. These attacks often confined him to darkened rooms for days at a time and prevented his travelling. The fear of permanent blindness also hastened the publication of his poetry. The trachoma left Wordsworth sensitive to light and reliant upon wearing these green eyeshades to relieve his photophobia. Through these objects and letters, I will offer a new materialist perspective on Wordsworth’s blindness and explore the intimate relationship between the materiality of blindness and of writing in the poet’s imagination. This materialist approach questions the use of blindness in the construction of the Romantic literary canon, in which Wordsworth’s interest in blindness is often taken to uphold an idealist model of the mind and imagination, which privileges the sovereignty of the mind above the senses.