ABSTRACT
This chapter explores illustrated guides, albums and anthologies published in the nineteenth century, to show how the Wordsworth Country was represented and what reader-tourists were invited to experience there. Verbal and visual descriptions together helped to construct the cultural landscape of Wordsworth's Lake District, and they contributed to its promotion and preservation in times of accelerating change. The Penny Magazine tour is of Langdale, for which Thorne provided illustrations of Blea Tarn, the Solitary's cottage, Dungeon Ghyll and Langdale peasantry. The most noticeable thing about these pictures is that they are drawn specifically to illustrate sites and spots described in Wordsworth's poetry and to encourage tourists to locate them. Payn's The Lakes in Sunshine is one of the earliest photographically illustrated guidebooks, containing 16 photographs along with 40 engravings, introducing various localities associated with Wordsworth's poetry. Despite his praise for Wordsworth's poetic fidelity to place the topographies of the poems are not always identifiable or pictorially portrayable.
