The Englishman's England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Pimlico)

by IanOusby (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.40

  In this original study, Ian Ousby investigates the landmarks chosen by the English for their leisure travel over centuries. He looks in particular at four types of attraction still prominent on the tourist map of England: literary shrines, country houses, picturesque ruins and the natural landscape. All of these first became objects of fashionable attention during the 18th century, when improvements in transport combined with a spirit of practical inquiry to breed the first generation of travellers who called themselves tourists . Drawing on a wide range of sources - journals, travel books and guidebooks, novels and poems, as well as many engravings - Ian Ousby traces the canons of taste which led the early tourists to seek out places like Stratford-upon-Avon, Chatsworth, Tintern Abbey and the Lake District, and records the stages by which these places acquired the trappings of the tourist attraction. Above all, he shows the development not just of an industry but of a state of mind marked, from its earliest phase, by the underlying fear that tourism is fated to spoil or even destroy the very thing it most admires.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1990

  $3.40

  This fascinating and original study shows that the English tourist industry is not a peculiarly modern creation. Concentrating on four types of perennial tourist attraction - literary shrines, country houses, picturesque ruins, and the natural landscape - Ian Ousby identifies the canons of taste that made them objects of fashionable attention in the eighteenth-century, and records how they acquired the trappings of the full-blown tourist attraction. He traces the development not just of an industry but of a state of mind - marked from its earliest days by the haunting fear that tourism spoils and maybe even destroys the very things it most admires. The Englishman's England is highly illustrated throughout.