William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, 1820-1900, by

In William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, Saeko Yoshikawa explores changes to the Lake District tourism industry throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Her focus is on guidebooks, anthologies, pictorial albums, personal recollections, and biographical accounts; sources, in other words, largely overlooked in scholarly works. Yoshikawa's study follows on from works such as Mike Robinson and Hans-Christian Andersen's edited collection Literature and Tourism and Nicola Watson's monograph The Literary Tourist in demonstrating how tourists' responses to writers were increasingly influential throughout the nineteenth century in the construction and development of a writer's reputation.1 It enters into a productive critical conversation with Scott Hess's recent monograph, William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, but, whereas Hess demonstrates how guidebooks utilized Wordsworth's construction of the Lake District as ‘a museum-like space charged with middle-class aesthetic meanings’ (p. 11), Yoshikawa reveals how these guidebooks engaged with and altered what it meant to be ‘Wordsworthian’.2 Her approach complements Stephen Gill's in Wordsworth and the Victorians; whilst Gill demonstrates Wordsworth's impact on canonical and mainstream Victorian literature and culture, Yoshikawa's work indicates some of the ways in which Wordsworth was popularly interpreted and used in ways which did not always follow more well-known responses.3 Her study implicitly rejects a literary division of the nineteenth century; she reveals that Romantic concepts remained dominant cultural narratives with which Victorian commentators actively engaged.