ABSTRACT
Valorized in the eighteenth century through Picturesque tourism, a new and unprecedented accumulation of value accrued to the Lake District under the influence of the Lakeists, Wordsworth in particular. A middle-class tourist trade in the Lake District had given rise to hotels, lodging houses, weekend retreats and country residences. These intrusions were irritants to local literary and artistic circles but not overwhelmingly so. Once the greatest obstacles to railway enterprise, owners of estates have of late years been among its chief promoters. The defense of the Lake District landscape was conducted along Wordsworth's notion that it was 'a sort of national property'. But as land came up for sale in an expanding land market, it was realized that, unlike the National Gallery, to which art could be donated and thereby be made literally priceless, no statutory body existed to guarantee the permanent removal of land from circulation.
