WORDSWORTH, William (1770-1850). Autograph manuscript signed ('Wordsworth'), for the sonnet 'While they, her Playmates once, light-hearted tread', Rydal Mount, 12 February 1827.

WORDSWORTH, William (1770-1850). Autograph manuscript signed ('Wordsworth'), for the sonnet 'While they, her Playmates once, light-hearted tread', Rydal Mount, 12 February 1827.

One page, 217 x 190mm, 14 lines (small tear touching the signature). Provenance: by descent from Maria Jane Jewsbury’s biographer Eric Gillett (1893-1978).

An autograph manuscript for the poem 'While they, her Playmates once, light-hearted tread', apparently pre-dating the first appearance in print of the sonnet featuring the now-legendary stuffed owl. Based on an account given to Wordsworth by his friend, the writer Maria Jane Jewsbury (1800-1833), of a spell of childhood illness and the relief she derived from the presence of a taxidermic bird, the sonnet was first published in the 1827 edition of his Poetical Works, but only achieved widespread public recognition over a century later, as the inspiration for the title of D.B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee's The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (1930).

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