Robert Woof (scholar)

He was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998 and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000.

He was Vice-Chairman of the Drama Panel of the Arts Council (1982–88), including Acting chairman (1985–86); Vice-Chairman (1983–84) and Chairman (1984–88) of the Literature Panel; and Chairman of the English Touring Theatre (1993–2000).

He started working at Dove Cottage in 1974, where he was Honorary Keeper of collections of books, manuscripts and paintings (1974–89) and Honorary Secretary and Treasurer (1978–95). He was Director of the Wordsworth Trust and Wordsworth museum in 1989–2005.

He was a Lord Adams of Ennerdale Fellow (1961–62), and Lecturer (1962–71) and Reader (1971–92) in English Literature at University of Newcastle upon Tyne, holding a Leverhulme Fellowship in 1983–84.

In 1958 he married Pamela Moore; they had two sons and two daughters. He died in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 2005.

Robert Samuel Woof was born in Lancaster, England, the youngest of three children; their father was bailiff of Home Farm, part of the Royal Albert Institution, Lancaster. He attended Scotforth School and Lancaster Royal Grammar School and first visited Dove Cottage on a cycling tour in 1949. He attended Pembroke College, Oxford on a scholarship, graduating in 1953, and gained a doctorate (1958–61) with a Goldsmith Travelling Fellowship as a lecturer at University of Toronto; his PhD thesis was on 'The Literary Relations of Wordsworth and Coleridge 1795–1803'.

Robert Samuel Woof CBE FRSL (20 April 1931 – 7 November 2005) was an English scholar, most famous for having been the first Director of the Wordsworth Trust, which looks after Dove Cottage and runs the tourist attraction now known as Wordsworth Grasmere in Grasmere, the Lake District, Cumbria. Dove Cottage is known as the centre for British Romanticism movement, having been the home of William Wordsworth from 1799 to 1808.