1. William Wordsworth
This episode features Composed upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth. In 1802, Wordsworth, the great Romantic poet of nature and the man famous for writing about the Lake District, daffodils and clouds, penned a short but electrifying poem about the stinking, filthy, heaving city of London. In fact, the poem was a captivating, sublime portrait of the city at dawn which still has the power to catch one's breath. Sheers investigates what Wordsworth was doing when he wrote the poem on a summer morning in 1802, and uncovers a story that involves three different women. Wordsworth lived in Grasmere in the Lake District, sharing a small cottage in an unusual domestic arrangement with his sister Dorothy. In the spring of that year he decided to marry an old schoolfriend, Mary Hutchinson. However, in order to do so he first needed to clear the air with his French ex-girlfriend and mother of his daughter Caroline, a nine-year-old girl he had yet to meet.
