In the summer of 1790 William Wordsworth and his friend, Robert Jones, spent their summer vacation in France and Switzerland. The record of this memorable journey has been left to us in two of Wordsworth's poems: Descriptive Sketches written in 1792 and The Prelude, Book VI, written probably in 1804. The journey described in each is, of course, the same, yet variations in the accounts are quite marked. The immediate reaction as to the causes of the differences, no doubt, is that Wordsworth had forgotten many of the details of the journey. Yet this explanation cannot be true, as a careful analysis shows. Garrod, in his paragraph concerning Wordsworth's poetical theory that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” hints at the real reason for the discrepancies:
The question [he says] is interesting, not only in connection with Descriptive Sketches, but also as affecting the problem of the essential truthfulness of large parts of The Prelude.