The Romantic Lakes from Wordsworth to Beatrix Potter

When Daniel Defoe rode through the Lake District in the early 18th century, he described the area as ‘the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England.’ But for Victorians such as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, the Lakes offered a landscape of supreme beauty. How did this change come about? 

In this lecture, Jonathan Bate follows in the footsteps of the 18th-century inventors of the ‘picturesque’ and shows how Wordsworth shaped the vision of his native region, leading to the foundation of the National Trust and the idea of a National Park.