Coterie Culture, the Print Trade, and the Emergence of the Lakes Tour, 1724–1787

Although the popularity of the English Lake District tour of the late eighteenth century is well-recognized, little attention has focused on the media trajectory of the tour's emergence. This article argues that a culturally prestigious discourse of domestic tourism coalesced in the 1770s as a collaborative product of manuscript and print cultures. An early tradition of commercialized travel writing (Defoe, Richardson, Gilpin, Dalton, Amory) can be seen to invoke and exploit the cultural authority of coexisting manuscript travel accounts by coteries of gentlemen (Brown, Lyttelton, Gray, Pennant). The end result is the authoritative figure of the gentleman-writer as amateur expert, associated with modernity as well as elegant taste. Ultimately, the print trade helped to entrench a social and cultural gap between the privileged traveler and the humble tourist, between the elite writer and the uncultivated reader, that enabled Wordsworth's successful self-authorization as the poet of the Lakes and as the characteristic figure of Romantic high literary culture in print.