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  A Scuttle for Dorothy Wordsworth This ‘Tale of Two Dorothys’ portrays William Wordsworth’s sister at different stages in her life. A scuttle such as Heaney describes in the piece still sits next to the hearth at the Wordsworths’ Dove Cottage at Grasmere in the English Lake District. The first Dorothy young, energetically poking and raking the grate (jig-jigging her iron shovel) with tetchy, noisy determination (barracking a pile of lumpy coals). The man with the appropriate name (Thomas Ashburner) lived in a cottage opposite Dove Cottage and did odd jobs for her including coal delivery. Dorothy is indifferent to what is going on around her, wracked with pain (her toothache ablaze), a condition aggravated by the stoking process (every […]