THE PICTURESQUE STORY OF A REGENCY BLUE-STOCKING AND THE ROMANTIC NAMING OF TENT LODGE
Walking or driving around the head of Coniston Water , there it is between the lane and the lake-shore . Tent Lodge . An odd name . . .
Looking around Hawkshead’s Parish Church , St Michael and All Angels , there’s the name again . A clue . On a white marble memorial . To George Smith of Tent Lodge , Coniston , who lived from 1751 to 1822 . And to his wife , Juliet , [ nee Mott ] , 1754 to 1836 . And an inscription “ In memory of Elizabeth eldest daughter of George Smith of Coniston Esqr. She died August 7th , 1806 , aged 29 . She possessed great talents , exalted virtues , and humble piety .”
Intriguing . . .
The family lived near Coniston , but their remains were interred at Hawkshead . . . Straightforward it turns out : Hawkshead parish extended over Hawkshead and Monk Coniston Moors [ now mainly covered by Grizedale Forest ] to include a chunk of the north-eastern shore of Coniston Water : the boundary was School Beck .
But why Tent Lodge ?
The name is literal .
Tent Lodge is named in memory of the death of the young scholar and translator Elizabeth - familiarly ‘ Bessie’ - Smith , who died of tuberculosis on 7 August 1806 in a tent sited where the house now stands .
In many ways , Bessie has come down to us as an idea , almost a hallucination , an ephemeral shadow of the late Picturesque / early Romantic ideal : a true spirit of a very particular moment in time when bliss was it in that dawn to be alive and to be young was very heaven . . .
The interest of the literary Lakers , and especially of Thomas de Quincey , opium-eater and early - first ? - Editor of The Westmorland Gazette , 1818 / 1819 , was piqued by her early death , and by that small white marble tablet , “ raised to her memory , on which there is the scantiest record that , for a person so eminently accomplished , I ever met with . . . Anything so unsatisfactory and common-place I have rarely known . As much or more is often said of the most insipid people , whereas Miss Smith was really a most extraordinary person . I have conversed with Mrs Hannah More often about her , and I never failed to draw forth some fresh anecdote illustrating the vast extent of her knowledge , the simplicity of her character , the gentleness of her manners , and her unaffected humility . She passed , it is true , almost inaudibly through life ; and the stir which was made after her death soon subsided . But the reason was , that she wrote but little . Had it been possible for the world to measure her powers , rather than her performances , she would have been placed , perhaps , in the estimate of posterity , at the head of learned women ; whilst her sweet and feminine character would have rescued her from all shadow and suspicion of that reproach which too often settles upon the learned character when supported by female aspirants .” [ Tait’s Magazine ] .
Phew !
So . . . Who was this paragon ? And what is her connection with Tent Lodge ?
She was the second child and eldest daughter of a military man , [ variously described as Captain or Colonel , following promotion ] George Smith , 1751 - 1822 , of Burnhall , in the county of Durham ; Elizabeth was born there in 1776 . De Quincey states that the family moved “ to the splendid inheritance of Piercefield , a show-place on the banks of the Wye ,” but , when Elizabeth was 15 going on 16 , through the failure of a banking house , the family was bankrupted , and the estate lost . Elizabeth was devastated by the loss of the library : “ not a volume was reserved , for the family were proud in their integrity , and would receive no favours from their creditors .”
The Smith family lived in various places in England and Ireland before moving to the Lakes in 1800 , when , with the help of the Quaker writer and intellectual , Thomas Wilkinson , they settled in a cottage in Patterdale , on the banks of Ullswater , not far from where Thomas Clarkson , the Abolitionist , was living in retirement . A couple of years later they moved to Townson Ground on the north-eastern shore of Coniston Water , a Picturesque spot with panoramic views of the lake and fells .
As Norman Nicholson puts it in The Lakers , [ Robert Hale Ltd , 1955 ] , “ Here , for three or four years , Miss Smith lived the life of a romantic young lady after a pattern which was already beginning to grow old-fashioned . She climbed the hills with Wilkinson , made sketches with William Green , read Mrs Radcliffe , surrendered herself with immense enthusiasm to the hypnotism of Ossian . Her only formal education had been from a governess , a girl about her own age , qualified to teach no more than French , yet she showed a quite remarkable talent for languages . As well as French , she taught herself Italian , Spanish , German , Latin , Greek and Hebrew , and acquired some knowledge of Arabic and Persian and a smattering of Welsh and Erse . She made a good many translations , especially from German and Hebrew , yet , with all her bookishness , she never seems to have felt the least curiosity about Wordsworth , or anything he had written , even though both Wilkinson and Green were friends of his .”
The manuscript of Elizabeth Smith’s translation from the Hebrew of The Book of Job , consisting of some 50 close-written pages , and dated 1803 , is now in the collection of The Ruskin Museum , Coniston ; Orme , [ Bibliotheca Biblica , page
413 ] , describes the book published in 1810 from this translation as “ a good English version of Job , produced chiefly by the aid of Parkhurst’s Lexicon ; in which almost all the peculiar renderings of Miss Smith’s version will be found .”
We see Elizabeth Smith almost entirely through the eyes of her friends , because her translations reveal nothing of herself , and the letters and fragments of poetry seem to have received the treatment one might expect from an editor whose name was Harriet Bowdler . Throughout her life , however , Elizabeth Smith was extremely fond of writing poetry . The following - Bowdlerised ? - lines date from 1792 :
“ How charming then o’er hill and dale to stray ,
When first the sun shot forth his morning beam :
Or when at eve he hid his golden ray ,
To climb the rocks , and catch the last faint gleam ;
Or when the moon imbrued in blood did seem ,
To watch her rising from the distant hill ,
Her soft light trembling on the azure stream ,
Which gently curl’d , while all beside was still :
How would such scenes my heart with admiration fill ! ”
and hark back to a softer , gentler iambic pastorale far removed from the vigour of Wordsworth’s brave new world .
Because she is such an ethereal , insubstantial , almost ghostly , figure amid the Lakeland literati , this poetic fragment may provide a truer perception of her than De Quincey’s description of her as “ a good mathematician and algebraist . She was a very expert musician . She drew from nature , and had an accurate knowledge of perspective .”
For whereas with Wordsworth , it solidifies into fact , The Picturesque evaporates into a dream with Elizabeth Smith . She described the beginning of her metamorphosis thus :
“ One very hot evening in July , I took a book , and walked
about two miles from home , where I seated myself on a stone
beside the Lake . Being much engaged by a poem I was reading ,
I did not perceive that the sun was gone down , and was succeeded
by a very heavy dew ; till in a moment I felt struck on the chest as
if with a sharp knife . I returned home , but said nothing of the pain .
The next day , being also very hot , and every one busy in the hay-field ,
I thought I would take a rake , and work very hard , to produce
perspiration , in the hope that it might remove the pain , but it did not .”
It was consumption , of course . The doctors had no cure , but they let her decline in peace . After taking the allegedly curative waters at Bath and Matlock , she returned to Coniston , where she spent most of the day in a tent on the lawn across the lane from Townson Ground . As she lay slowly fading away , she suggested that this lawn should be the site of the family’s long-talked-of new home . She died in August 1806 , some 199 years ago , and her family observed her wishes - and the new house was called Tent Lodge , in homage and remembrance . Thomas Wilkinson , the afore-mentioned Quaker yeoman poet from Yanwath , laid out the grounds .
Norman Nicholson sees Elizabeth Smith “ fading out , melting away , without resentment , without bitterness , as quietly , as sweetly as the evaporation of early morning rain . It was - and I say this not unaware of the poignancy of her story - the almost perfect picturesque death : the gentle progression from the lesser fantasy to the greater , from the known to the unknown , the unnoticed going down of the sun , the book of poetry , the mountains , the shadows , the darkness . . .”
The Romantic and literary connections of Tent Lodge did not begin and end with Elizabeth - “ Bessie” - Smith . Few houses embody such rich associations .
Tennyson , soon-to-be Poet Laureate and master of Arthurian romance , spent part of his honeymoon there in 1850 . He and his bride, Emily , were visited by Matthew Arnold , Thomas Carlyle , Coventry Patmore , and Edward Lear . They walked and boated , and Tennyson and Patmore climbed mountains . Whilst walking , Tennyson composed The Princess , becoming so engrossed that , on several occasions , he failed to notice the entrance to Tent Lodge and went on walking . Emily remedied that by having the gatepost painted white so he could not miss it !
The Tennysons returned to Tent Lodge in August and September 1857 . Their guest was Charles Dodgson , Oxford mathematician and pioneer photographer , but not yet famous as Lewis Carroll , future author of the Alice books .
A 20th Century owner , Miss Emma Holt often shared afternoon tea in the drawing room with her great friend , Mrs William Heelis aka Beatrix Potter , who used to spend time reading the Tales from her Little Books to her friend’s avid young relative , George Melly . He says that it was Aunt Emma who first introduced him to the gloriously coloured paintings of The Pre-Raphaelites : she kept a few small and choice works from the family’s famous collection , [ which she eventually bequeathed to Liverpool museums for display in her old home , Sudley Hall ] , at Tent Lodge .
Miss Holt permitted the use of her family’s sailing dinghies - for it was her shipping family ancestors that had introduced leisure boats to the working lake of Coniston Water - to the Collingwoods , at Lanehead . In the years between 1903 and 1913 , Dora and Barbara and , especially , Robin and Ursula Collingwood taught the young Arthur Ransome to sail on Coniston . He came to know the lake and its many moods most intimately . A generation later , the adventures afloat of Barbara , Robin and Ursula Collingwoods’ youthful nephew and nieces , the Altounyans , jumbled up with Arthur Ransome’s memories of his own boyhood experiences , and his observation of the antics of another old acquaintance’s two red-capped girls , Georgie and Paulie [ Rawdon ] Smith , sailing and fishing , dressed as boys , [ and so robust in comparison with poor Elizabeth Smith , who was not related ] , who just happened to be cousins removed of Miss Holt - added to his desire to escape forever the rigours of newspaper deadlines - inspired that same Arthur Ransome to write Swallows and Amazons .
He borrowed the plain Georgian architecture and rectilinear trellis of Tent Lodge , creatively transported to the opposite end of the lake , near Allan Tarn , [ ‘ Octopus Lagoon’ ] , and with the embellishments of a little artistic licence , for the Amazons’ home , Beck Foot . The stronghold of Peel Island , with its secret rocky harbour , celebrated by W . G . Collingwood as the refuge of his fictional Norse outlaw , the eponymous Thorstein of the Mere , [ which had been one of the boy Arthur Ransome’s favourite books ] , was purloined as the basis of the immortal Wild Cat Island .
And , of course , R . G . Collingwood is now considered one of the most original philosophers of his generation . At eight , he tried to read Kant’s Theory of Ethics : he could not understand a word of it , but felt ‘ intense excitement’ and knew that he must become a philosopher - which after a distinguished career as the premier Roman historian of his day , he did .
