Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar Period

Chapter 7 explores how the cultural identity of the Lake District was redefined and preserved after the First World War through two trends: new global tourism, and the advent of outdoor movements. First it focuses on foreign visitors, including American and Japanese tourists, who have made no slight contribution to the re-invention of ‘Wordsworth Country’. Then it explores some of the new walkers’ guides, including those by William Thomas Palmer, Maxwell Fraser and Henry Herbert Symonds, that were particularly attuned to foot-stepping through Wordsworth’s Lake District and encouraged readers to go back to Romantic pedestrianism. The chapter also pays attention to how the hiking and cycling boom among urban working classes changed the tourist landscape in the Lake District, becoming the driving force behind conservation and access campaigns and the new National Parks movement. Taken as a whole, the chapter investigates how Wordsworth’s legacy was preserved and then rehabilitated in the interwar era of mass motoring.