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

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 which first 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 a