With William Wordsworth and Modern Travel, Saeko Yoshikawa offers an assiduously researched and well-edited examination of the continuing influence of William Wordsworth in debates over access to, and modes of transport within, the Lake District from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1930s. Transcending the Victorian focus of her work in William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, 1830–1900 (2014), Yoshikawa grapples with the ways in which Wordsworth continued to affect arguments regarding the Lake District as transport technology altered both who could visit and under what conditions. Her work revisits Wordsworth's early role within debates over rail access, then tracks the manifestation and revivification of “Wordsworthian” arguments through the birth of motorized touring, the First World War, and the era of increased automobile and foot traffic in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the 1840s, Wordsworth's arguments against the expansion of rail lines in the Lake District prompted opponents to chide his apparent resistance to the democratizing and economic power of rail. Nonetheless, his commitment to the Lake District as a “national property” was later cited both by those pressing for expanded access to, and those pressing for expanded preservation of, the region (45). Yoshikawa examines the impact of Wordsworth on the preservation efforts of John Ruskin and Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, and she provides a detailed recounting of the newspaper debate that raged over the expansion of railways by the 1880s. However, it is in turning to the arrival of the automobile in the Lake District that Yoshikawa establishes a critical lens through which to examine Wordsworth's continuing impact, and makes a valuable contribution to scholarly works of the last two decades focusing upon landscape and nation. Drawing upon the work of Peter Merriman (Mobility, Space and Culture, 2012), she indicates that the decline in Wordsworthian literary tourism by the early twentieth century was in part related to the rise of the automobile and the altered perceptions of landscape it brought. Her primary research on motoring and the tourist experience demonstrates how automobiles reclaimed a sense of individual freedom compromised by the rise of rail. Moreover, it draws attention to the echoes of a romantic engagement with landscape and nature that pervaded a number of early accounts of travel by car through the Lake District. Yoshikawa argues that a “Romantic lyricism” was being recreated for the “motor age” (147). Nearly concurrent with the rise of the automobile was that of the bicycle. Though less of a focus for Yoshikawa than automobiles, bicycles allowed travelers to remove themselves from simple delivery to the Lake District by train, and consequently to explore hidden roads in an inherently earth-friendly and democratic fashion.

In the midst of the First World War, Wordsworth's romantic legacy was revived, as his early nineteenth-century commitment to a quintessentially English landscape in the era of Napoleon resonated in the new struggle against Germany. A new movement emerged to preserve geographic sites as memorials to those who had died. Yoshikawa writes, “In the Lake District post-war commemoration was thus linked with conservation and access campaigns, opening a way to the National Park movement in the mid-twentieth century” (177). Though Wordsworth's memory survived in the early twentieth century, Yoshikawa writes that after the First World War, his “landscape helped preserve the memory of those who had fought and died to ensure its liberty for future generations” (177). Yet, in the 1920s, the days when automobile drivers were curiosities were over, and choked roadways heightened concerns that the experience of the Lake District, which Wordsworth had done so much to shape, would be lost. However, the District's future would soon be affected by the broader attention it garnered at a national and international level. While English tourists may have taken less time with Wordsworth, steady cohorts of visitors arrived from overseas, helping to gird the traditions of literary tourism. Yoshikawa remarks that the continuing publication of guidebooks that highlighted Wordsworthian sites were still go-to resources for a new generation. As the roads filled with package tours, many turned to walking to visit more remote sites and made use of the guides. “So while as a general trend Wordsworth's reputation may have been in decline, in tourist culture his association with the Lake District continued to introduce new readers to his poetry,” she writes (225).

In a final portion of her work Yoshikawa discusses the emergence of the youth hosteling movement of the 1930s, which coincided with a number of efforts seeking to preserve access to areas of natural beauty. In the spirit with which young walkers trekked across the countryside, Yoshikawa finds echoes of a Wordsworthian spirit 200 years old. And this spirit was one that was becoming more global; Yoshikawa notes a trans-Atlantic radio broadcast of 1935 that attempted to capture the sounds of spring in the Lake District. Although there would continue to be unease at the commodification of some aspects of Wordsworth's legacy by the 1930s, his desire to see the appreciation of the Lake District widened, but not trampled, continued to inform efforts to preserve and promote the region. It is here that Yoshikawa's work closes, short of a partial resolution of many of the themes she has assessed, as the era of the Second World War and the establishment of the Lake District National Park in 1951 wait in the wings. Yet to address this may well have involved the addition of multiple chapters to her study. Thus, for its rigorous research and elucidation of the impact of transport upon the evolving experience of landscape and tourism from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Yoshikawa's work offers both an insightful and significant contribution to current scholarship.