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Eventually, tourists were able to take their own photographs, and to create highly personal souvenirs. The carefully selected photographs and captions in this album from the 1870s and 1880s reveal the creator’s fascination with finding sites that…

These small photographs were sold loose in packets, so that tourists could incorporate them into their own ‘snapshot albums’. Also shown is a reproduced page from an album where a tourist did just that. Buying photographs in this format allowed…

These photographs, like those in the case below, show how photography helped to make the Lake District a popular tourist destination. Wordsworth’s poetry suggested scenes to photograph, and collections of photographs shaped how readers understood his…

By the end of the nineteenth century, some tourist sights had been photographed repeatedly by different firms. Stybarrow Crag was a favourite subject: it is pictured not only in this album, but in several other albums in this exhibition. Many of…

In a famous scene in Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, the young Wordsworth steals a boat from the base of Stybarrow Crag. In this view, the crag is depicted with a rowing boat in the foreground: a direct allusion to Wordsworth’s…

Professional photographers determined what scenes they would photograph, and their choices helped to determine which spots tourists visited. The views in the concertina album above suggest an itinerary for a tour that might include the Bowder Stone,…

Early photographic negatives were made out of glass, and photographers had to immerse them in chemicals immediately after exposing them. To capture a good view, a photographer might have to carry heavy, delicate negatives, chemicals, and camera…

As well as being collected in books, souvenir photographs and views were also sold separately in portfolios like these. Here the publisher, not the purchaser, selected the views. Many of the scenes were included because of their connections to…

Just as Wordsworth had been wary of the rise of tourism, his trustees were suspicious of the illustrated books that encouraged tourism. They claimed that A. W. Bennett—the publisher of Our English Lakes, Mountains and Waterfalls—had violated their…

The landscape depicted in the photographs was not simply a natural phenomenon, but was modified for tourists’ convenience. In this photograph of the Bowder Stone, you can clearly see the stairs that allowed tourists to climb up and survey the views…