In The Making of a Cultural Landscape: The English Lake District as Tourist Destination, 1750–2010, editiors John Walton and Jason Wood take as a starting point the Lake District's 2012 application for UNESCO World Heritage status as a “cultural landscape,” a category defined by UNESCO as including the “combined works of nature and of man,” illustrating “the evolution of human society and settlement over time, under the influence of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment and of successive social, economic, and cultural forces, both internal and external” (4). The English Lake District, often associated with “nature” but shaped by centuries of intensive human use, exemplifies this notion of a cultural landscape. Human shaping, as both these volumes under review make clear, is not just material, economic, and social, but also imaginative, as the physical evolution of the landscape has been inextricably intertwined with the history of its literary, artistic, and cultural imagination. This theme—the way various forms of culture have constructed and helped to shape places over time—has recently begun to emerge as a new field of scholarship in its own right: historical literary (or cultural) geography.

Both The Making of a Cultural Landscape and Saeko Yoshikawa's William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism focus specifically on tourism, which over several centuries has fundamentally reshaped both the physical forms and cultural meanings of the Lake District landscape. As Walton writes, the current Lake District landscape depends “on a tourism which is inherent in its modern nature, but also threatens to ‘spoil’ it in the eyes of people who are themselves tourists” (48), since without the economic activity that tourism brings and the various policies and subsidies associated with it, current upland farming practices in the region would not be economically sustainable and much of the landscape would transform into brush or bogs. In another irony, which Susan Denyer points out in her essay here, “The Lake District Landscape: Cultural or Natural?,” the recent focus on the ecological preservation of nature—at least partly a legacy of the Romantic celebration of the Lake District—has by limiting traditional forms of human management in the area threatened the very aspects of the landscape that led writers and artists to define and celebrate it as “nature” in the first place.

William Wordsworth's presence looms large in both studies, providing the central focus of Yoshikawa's book, which explores the poet's seminal influence on the nineteenth-century development of Lake District tourism. Although explicit Wordsworth sites such as Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount are not at the top of current Lake District tourist attractions, both books make clear his extraordinary influence in shaping the way people perceive the Lake District landscape and assign cultural meanings to it, which has in turn shaped the area's physical, social, and environmental development. Walton argues, for instance, that Wordsworth's emphasis on walking, quiet contemplation, and spiritual and imaginative reverie in nature, which historically led to “claims for a unique relationship between poetry, locality, topography, landscape, and a virtuous society,” continues to lie at the heart of the Lake District's special cultural appeal, including its current UNESCO World Heritage Site application (36). Wordsworth's suggestion in his 1835 Guide through the District of the Lakes that the area should be defined as “a sort of national property,” also helped germinate the concept of the National Park that eventually led to the Lake District's designation, in 1951, among Britain's first National Parks, with major implications for how this and other landscapes are defined and managed. In The Making of a Cultural Landscape, Melanie Hall's essay, “American Tourists in Wordsworthshire: From ‘National Property’ to ‘National Park,’” traces the rich transatlantic network of social and cultural connections through which such influence spread—a transatlantic theme also significant in Yoshikawa's book, as in many recent studies of anglophone historical literary geography.

Yoshikawa's book also participates in a recent surge of literary interest in “author countries,” landscapes that became imaginatively defined through their association with specific literary figures and their works (see Nicola Watson's The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic & Victorian Britain [2006] for an influential founding study in the field). The study of author countries is part of a broader recent interest, in history, literary studies, cultural geography, and cultural studies more generally, in the historical construction and influence of sites of collective memory, as theorized for instance in the work of Pierre Nora and in Ann Rigney's The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (2012). As is typical in such scholarship, Yoshikawa focuses attention on the historical processes through which literary and other cultural texts are disseminated and received more than on the originating contexts of the texts' first production, since dissemination and reception in large part determine those texts' impact on the imaginative construction of place. Yoshikawa's central thesis, in this respect, is that Lake District guidebooks and a diverse array of other cultural texts and discourses, including “biographical accounts and personal recollections of Wordsworth, pictorial albums and poetic anthologies” (12), as well as various forms of visual art, local stories, and folklore, have been fundamental in defining Wordsworth's association with the Lake District and its impact. “By examining how Wordsworth was quoted, consumed, and digested in and by tourist culture,” Yoshikawa claims to show how his “reputation was fostered and finally guaranteed by tourist guides as much as by editions of his poems, biographies, and critical works” (12).

William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism begins in this spirit with an anonymous 1850 folio album entitled Wordsworth, which brings together more than 120 drawings with various Wordsworthian associations. The sketches were drawn during a Wordsworth-inspired tour of the Lake District between 8 and 18 August, only three months after the writer's death. Part of the dramatic interest of the chapter comes from Yoshikawa's attempt to identify the sketchbook's creator, whom she surmises must have had intimate knowledge of Wordsworth's life, available only to his immediate circle of friends and family at the time. The sketch album, interpreted in relation to Wordsworth niece Sara Hutchinson's journal over the same period, provides a wonderful introduction to the theme of the Lake District as “Wordsworth country,” imaginatively shaped by the poet's life and writings as inflected through the tourist imagination.

The three subsequent main sections of Yoshikawa's book focus, in turn, on the history of nineteenth-century guidebooks to the Lake District and their formative role in associating the area with Wordsworth; the history and tourist development of Wordsworth's four main Lake District houses, his adult residences at Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount and childhood homes in Cockermouth and Hawkshead; and, in the section titled “The Popular Reception of Wordsworth,” local reminiscences and lore as well as paintings, engravings, and other visual images that connected Wordsworth with the region. A final short chapter expands the study of Wordsworthian tourism and imaginative influence to the global scale, focusing on the Japanese writer Ichinosuke Takagi's 1925 Wordsworthian tour of the Lake District, eventually published as By the Lakes: Visiting Poetical Sites of Wordsworth (1950). Takagi's Wordsworthian travelogue has had a strong influence on subsequent Japanese interest in the area and its Wordsworthian associations, including on Yoshikawa herself. The book then ends with an extremely helpful appendix of “Key Texts,” arranged year by year in chronological order from 1752 to 1900, together with a conventional bibliography especially rich in primary sources.

William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism does a wonderful job surveying a wide field of nineteenth-century cultural materials that linked Wordsworth's writing and tourism and played a key influence on the imaginative construction of the Lake District. Its list of primary sources is wide-ranging and deep, covering many genres, from newspaper and magazine articles to travelogues, guidebooks, literary guides, and photographic and artistic collections, and it provides a vital bibliographic resource for literary scholars, historians, and others studying Wordsworth's association with the Lake District or the overall imaginative construction of the area. Yoshikawa's cataloging tendency is at times a weakness as well as a strength, however. Yoshikawa spends so much time introducing and commenting on various sources that she does not theorize the overall significance of her project or connect it to major historical trends, such as the overall development of tourism in the nineteenth century or the growth of Lake District tourism in particular, as much as she might. The epilogue, for instance, offers wonderful opportunities for thinking about how and why Wordsworth's touristic influence has spread globally into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but this chapter is very short, undertheorized, and not well connected to the rest of the volume. One cannot ask all things from all books, however, and Yoshikawa's impressive archival work and clear narrative provide a vital historical overview of how tourism, in dialogue with Wordsworth's writings and identity, constructed the Lake District as “Wordsworth Country” and shaped the area's overall cultural significance.

The Making of a Cultural Landscape includes not only an overview of the impact of tourism on the historical shaping of the Lake District as a “cultural landscape” but also a series of specific, insightful studies at various levels of historical scope and detail, among them essays on the romantic construction of the Lake District; the history of villas in the region and their relation to other social and environmental developments; the area's important role in the history of British mountaineering and rock climbing; and the overall role of sport in shaping Lake District tourism. It also offers more focused case studies on the picturesque Claife Station on Lake Windermere; Furness Abbey and its tourist history; and the postindustrial town of Millom, located outside the National Park area at the mouth of the Duddon Valley in West Cumbria, on what is usually considered the geographical, cultural, and economic margin of the Lake District. The book's essays are of consistently strong quality, without any obvious “weaklings” in the bunch, and speak to an eclectic range of historical and cultural interests. Written by scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary and institutional backgrounds—including professors and lecturers of history, English, museum studies, and local and landscape history, as well as environmental and heritage consultants with more pragmatic political experience in the field—the book exemplifies a multidisciplinary approach to historical cultural geography and is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and cultural construction of the Lake District.

Taken together, these two books demonstrate the power and importance of studying the imaginative history of places and how it interacts with material, social, and economic history. Imagination, it turns out, is itself historically place-based, and plays as important a role in shaping landscapes and their wider cultural influence as these other, seemingly more immediate forces. This approach to the English Lake District, still very much inflected by William Wordsworth's historical and cultural legacy, reveals new insights and complexities and sheds important light not only on our understanding of that region, but also more broadly on the development of modern tourism, heritage landscapes, and author countries and their continuing importance for the social and environmental imagination.