Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland

In 1794, Ann Radcliffe set off on a tour of the Lake District. She was at the very height of her fame, having already published three of her most successful Gothic novels. Her ‘Observations during a Tour to the Lakes’ provides an important stepping-stone in the journey from picturesque tourism to Wordsworth’s development of a poetics of place from 1799 onwards. Though ‘Observations’ has been marginalised within subsequent accounts of Lakes literature, it was well-known in Romantic contexts and remained at the forefront of cultural accounts of the Lakes for many years, informing both Thomas De Quincey and John Keats’s expectations about the region prior to their own encounters with this landscape.