EMILY HICKS has begun work as the new curator of Bridport Museum Trust.
Ms Hicks first ventured into the world of museums in her early teens when she used to dress up as a Victorian housemaid and cook Welsh cakes on an old range at an open air museum.
New Bridport Museum curator Emily Hicks
She studied for a BA in English Literature, and an MA in Victorian Media and Culture at Royal Holloway University.
From there, in 2004, she went to Grasmere in the Lake District. She had an internship for 18 months at the Wordsworth Trust. This looks after Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home between 1799 and 1808, and the Wordsworth Museum and Art Gallery. It has an internationally important collection of Romantic literature and art, with 63,000 catalogued items.
From January 2005 Ms Hicks served as the Trust’s education assistant, and ran an award-winning learning programme.
In May 2006 she became Assistant Curator at the Museum of Farnham in Surrey.
She’s now come to Bridport to replace Alice Martin, who left to work for the National Trust at Sir Winston Churchill’s house, Chartwell.
Ms Hicks said: “Bridport seems an incredibly friendly and vibrant place to live. I can’t wait to get stuck into life at the Museum, and continue the hard work of its staff and volunteers. It’s going to be the ‘must visit’ place in the town!”
Editor’s Note: This story draws on a press release issued by the Bridport Museum Trust. It will be interesting to see, given Ms Hicks’ Wordsworthian background, whether West Dorset – and West Somerset - will start to get more of a profile as a place of enormous importance to Wordsworth and Coleridge. It was down here in the West Country that the poems in the first edition of their revolutionary Lyrical Ballads (1798) were composed.
Wordsworth moved to Racedown Lodge, north of Marshwood, with his sister Dorothy on 26 September, 1795. They lived there rent-free and were paid £50 a year to look after a small boy called Basil Montagu, whom they raised on Rousseauistic principles of happiness and curiosity.
Racedown Lodge was owned by the Pinneys, whose money came from sugar plantations in the West Indies and slaves.
Kenneth Johnston’s biography of Wordsworth records how tramps once stole Racedown’s fencing, for firewood. West Dorset then had many poor people.
For several months at Racedown Wordsworth was depressed - but he emerged as a stronger poet, and became, of course, one of the greatest in the English language.
You can read more about Wordsworth and the mid-1790s at the Local Studies Centre in Gundry Lane - run by Bridport Museum Trust.
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I am so glad that the old bot didn’t nip down to West Bay and get inspired. It wouldn’t have the same ring would it?
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of silver mack-er-ills;
I like that. More please!
(While I’m thinking about it: in the original, it’s wild daffodils that Wordsworth writes about. There seem to be hardly any left in West Dorset now. James Crowden showed me the only ones I can remember seeing, over the other side of a hedge near Bettiscombe, not that far from Racedown. They looked amazing in the sunshine.
“They flash upon that inward eye…”
I can’t remember the next line – over to you!
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the mack-er-ills.
Or something along those lines. There’s a strong fish connection in there. Did he do a lot of local fishing?
He was more one for reading and walking around, I think.
He stole a boat once, but that was in the Lake District, and from what I can remember, it wasn’t to go fishing.
It ended up as something more mystical – or sublime – I’ll have a look.
A bit later: I’ve had a look. ‘Lustily he dipped his oars into the silent lake’ (I paraphrase) ’till a huge cliff upreared its head and like a living thing strode after him’ –
“… and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being…”
So definitely not fishing on that occasion.
But I still love your idea of the mack-er-ills.