Nicholson, Norman. The Lakers: The First Tourists. London: Robert Hale, 1955.
See Chap. 10, “The Wordsworths,” pp. 159–81.
Glendening — High Road (1997)
Glendening, John. The High Road: Romantic Tourism, Scotland, and Literature, 1720–1820. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Chapter 4 is devoted to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, 1803 and her brother’s Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, A.D. 1803.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Fennimore — Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect (2024)
Fennimore, Eve Dixon. “‘Viewed in Prospect or Retrospect’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Revisiting’ on the 1820 Continental Tour.” Criterion 17.1 (Winter, 2024): 89–103.
Abstract: “This paper argues that Dorothy Wordsworth, in her often overlooked Journal of a Tour on the Continent, was essentially ‘revisiting’ places that she was viewing for the first time, as she had visited them secondhand through William’s stories and writings about them. In 1820, Dorothy, William, and Mary Wordsworth embarked on a tour of the continent in the inverse direction of William’s youthful 1790 trip. For thirty years, Dorothy had heard stories and read about his experiences, building up an image in her mind of what the Continent would be like which changed her own exploration of the sights. By exploring Dorothy’s tour as a form of revisiting, we see how imagining a place before physically seeing it shapes the viewing experience, blurring the line between reality and imagination. Further, a close study of Dorothy’s journal illustrates the impermanence of sites and travelers as they inevitably change over time.”
Andrews — Search for the Picturesque (1989)
Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press; Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1989.
For references to DW, see index.
Copy: Library of Congress.
Digital copy: Internet Archive.
Bohls — Women Travel Writers (1995)
Bohls, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
See Chap. 6, “Dorothy Wordsworth and the Cultural Politics of Scenic Tourism,” pp. 170–208.
Summary: “Dorothy Wordsworth is best known not for her travel journals, but for those she kept at home: at the cottage she shared with her brother William in Grasmere, in the heart of the scenic Lake District. The prevalent image of Wordsworth as something of a homebody, content to cook, clean, and copy poems for her more publicly ambitious brother, contrasts with Mary Wollstonecraft’s self-assertive, consciously politicized persona. Feminist critics have been intrigued by the contrast between the habitual, sometimes distressing self-effacement of the sister’s writing and the brother’s expansive Romantic ego. But Wordsworth’s treatment of aesthetic discourse in the journals and in her remarkable travel narrative, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, shares significant features with Wollstonecraft’s anti-aesthetics. Both writers disrupt and reconceptualize the aesthetic perception of land. Both are concerned with the practical realities of dwelling in a place and the ways in which these can or should influence perceptual pleasure, for those who dwell there and those who travel through. ¶ The Grasmere Journals take advantage of a particular conjuncture of material and cultural conditions to achieve, with understated grace, a textual integration of aesthetic and practical. Walking in the hills and enjoying their visual qualities takes its place for Wordsworth among the practices of housework, gardening, socializing, almsgiving, reading, and writing.”
Ożarska — Grand Tourists or Travellers? (2013)
Ożarska, Magdalena. “Grand Tourists or Travellers? Dorothy Wordsworth’s and Mary Shelley’s Travel Journals.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 61.2 (2013): 107–120.
Abstract: “Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Journal of a Tour on the Continent and Mary Shelley’s 1844 Rambles illustrate two 19th-century approaches to the phenomenon of the Grand Tour: the Romantic (a traveller’s) and the anti-Romantic (a tourist’s). In terms of chronology, it would seem that both texts fully represent the Romantic approach to travel. However, this assumption will be tested in the present article. For a discussion thereof, apart from an overview of Chloe Chard’s characteristics of both approaches (1999), John Urry’s observations on tourist gazes (1995) may prove useful, if aspects of the anti-Romantic approach are determined in either text. A detailed examination reveals that Mary Shelley tends towards the concept of tourism rather than explorative travel despite embracing the national problems of her Italian ‘travelees.’ Dorothy Wordsworth’s travelogue, in turn, reflects the attitudes of the Romantic era.”
Digital text: Academia.
Dorothy Wordsworth 