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This chapter situates Romantic acts of travel in their larger context, which is the upsurge of tourism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The various modes of tourism that emerge in this period are discussed, as well as its corollary: a growing ethos of anti-tourism amongst some travellers. The chapter then goes on to discuss the forms of contemporary tourism that most irritated or unsettled the Romantic imagination, notably the Grand Tour, the picturesque tour, and the rise in the number of women travellers. It also explores some of the practices by which Romantic travellers defined themselves against these tourists, such as pedestrianism.

The chapter explores the political resonance of the figure of the maritime misadventurer, and by extension the political symbolism that could attach to the Romantic espousal of misadventure in travel and travel writing. The voyage and shipwreck literature introduced in Chapter 2 did not just bring into focus important existential questions in the Romantic era; it also returned repeatedly to issues of authority, insubordination, and mutiny which were especially resonant in the era of the French Revolution. The first section of the chapter explores these themes directly, whilst the second considers how they are reflected in the maritime imagery of two early works by Wordsworth: Salisbury Plain and The Borderers. The final section explores instances in which an identification with the sufferings of sailors led to a politically-motivated espousal of misadventure on the part of Romantic travellers (focusing on the Romantic practice of pedestrianism).

Focusing on the period 1840–1863, this chapter highlights how organised sports such as pedestrianism became examples of how to establish a working-class sporting spectacle in the years prior to football’s widespread development across the conurbation. The attractions of football were not apparent to the wider population prior to the 1870s; however, there was footballing activity in Manchester during the 1840s to 1860s. In terms of organised football, individual games were staged in the region, while multiple versions of football were developing throughout this period. Some resembled soccer, some rugby, but the end of the 1850s and beginning of the 1860s saw more distinction between the versions. By the 1860s rules were being documented across the country. The Football Association, established in London in 1863, aimed to produce one set of national rules to follow, while Manchester turned towards a version based on rugby. This chapter contains analysis of the games, incidents and related activities and provides an understanding of the developing sporting culture of the city.

Chapter 7 explores how the cultural identity of the Lake District was redefined and preserved after the First World War through two trends: new global tourism, and the advent of outdoor movements. First it focuses on foreign visitors, including American and Japanese tourists, who have made no slight contribution to the re-invention of ‘Wordsworth Country’. Then it explores some of the new walkers’ guides, including those by William Thomas Palmer, Maxwell Fraser and Henry Herbert Symonds, that were particularly attuned to foot-stepping through Wordsworth’s Lake District and encouraged readers to go back to Romantic pedestrianism. The chapter also pays attention to how the hiking and cycling boom among urban working classes changed the tourist landscape in the Lake District, becoming the driving force behind conservation and access campaigns and the new National Parks movement. Taken as a whole, the chapter investigates how Wordsworth’s legacy was preserved and then rehabilitated in the interwar era of mass motoring.

Resisting a standard reading of William Gilpin as ‘appropriating’ Scottish landscape from a privileged metropolitan perspective, I discover a more radical and environmentally sensitive potential in Gilpin’s texts on the picturesque, developed in the writings of John Stoddart, and empowering for women tourists like Sarah Murray and Dorothy Wordsworth. As the literary masterpiece of all the texts studied here, Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollectionsof a Tour in Scotland made a decisive break with the Pennantian tour as a ‘knowledge genre’ by developing a gendered version of her brother’s poetics of ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. Her gift for natural description is linked to the picturesque tradition, and briefly compared with Coleridge’s extraordinary Highland Tour notebooks. Read in tandem with her less ambitious second Highland tour of 1822, Recollections also presents a lively and sympathetic account of a plebeian Gaelic world in a moment of historical crisis.

This chapter reviews the primary design debates involved in neighborhood formation: whether they can or should be planned all at once and as complete units; their boundedness and centeredness, and their street composition and its effect on internal and external connectivity. All of these debates involve the limits and practicalities of neighborhood identity-building and consciousness, which can be thought of as being on a continuum from most extreme (whole units on clean slates) to more subtle (increasing connectivity via interconnecting pathways). Moving forward, there is hope for design resolution because the choices are not so black and white. Neighborhood design can maintain the positive aspects of identity-building by emphasizing centers (which also minimizes the need for explicit boundaries) and streets that can be simultaneously well connected and pedestrian based.