ABSTRACT
To make the Tour of the Lakes, to speak in fashionable terms, is the ton of the present hour’, declared the Monthly Magazine in 1778, and in the 1790's this was the most popular summer excursion in the kingdom, gaining new recruits from those debarred from travel in Europe by the happenings which, in the words of one traveller, has ‘rendered part of the continent a scene of horror and devestation’. By 1798 the Lake tourists had become a sufficiently well-known phenomenon to form the subject of a three-act comic opera, The Lakers:
Each season there delighted myriads throng,
To pass their time these charming scenes among:
For pleasure, knowledge, many thither hie,
For fashion some, and some—they know not why,
And these same visitors, in one and all,
The Natives by the name of LAKERS call. 1
