| This dissertation examines tourism in the English countryside between 1770 and 1840 as it was delimited in literature of the period, particularly in picturesque guidebooks to the Lake District and in William Wordsworth's poems. At that time, a growing number of travelers, taking the rural countryside as the primary object of their journeys, turned the landscape into a space for aesthetic contemplation, spiritual renewal, relaxation, and cultural capital. Analyzing guidebooks by Thomas West, Wordsworth, and others, as well as picturesque theories forwarded by William Gilpin and Richard Payne Knight, I argue that picturesque rhetoric revised privileged modes of landscape viewing, modes that were associated with landed power, and offered them to the tourist. The picturesque also authorized the circulation of landscape prints and descriptions as an industry for the reformation and training of bourgeois taste. I then consider how literary writings responded to Romantic and picturesque tourism. In the midst of urbanism, poets and theorists imbued the rural sphere with aesthetic, social, and philosophical meaning, claiming authority for the realm of tourism and culture. I trace the ideological division between county and city (and between work and leisure) in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Coleridge's "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I then consider works, like Wordsworth's "The Brothers," which lionize localism and rural stability. These concepts, I argue, form an ideological ground to define a morally acceptable social and economic mobility, represented by thoughtful tourism. Lastly, I look at landscape and rural travel in The Prelude . There, Wordsworth abandons the aesthetic formalism of the picturesque and sanctifies transcendent self-consciousness, but this transcendence still depends on trips through the countryside and on Wordsworth's poetry. Throughout his writings, Wordsworth invested the natural landscape (accessed through tourism) with the power to improve taste, elevate consciousness, and reform the self. At the same time, he hoped to direct our journeys and our modes of seeing and to supervise our cultural education, reworking the intellectual meanings of the individual, leisure, and the land itself. |
