Shakespeare and the Warwickshire Landscape in the Age of the Tourist

This chapter is part of a larger project on relationships with the Warwickshire landscape, between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. That work aims to establish how and why people passed through the county’s green spaces, what physical interactions they had with them – for instance walking (primarily, but also more broadly moving through on horses, barges, trains, cars and planes), digging (for crops and archaeological finds), surveying and quantifying (mapping, photographing and assessing the landscape and its minerals, water, flora and fauna), and how people represented those interactions in words or images. In what follows, I focus on a small part of those larger concerns, temporally and generically: the development of touristic travel books across the nineteenth century. My aim is to address, through an analysis of the range and focus of such publications, the role that Warwickshire’s landscape played in making the identity of the county more tangible, through the efforts of those artists who wrote and drew it into public consciousness.

In considering such questions, this chapter traces two arcs that meet as the Dugdale Society was being set up – the development of the genre of travel books on the Warwickshire landscape, expanding to reflect new modes of transport and touristic behaviour, and the emergence of academic study of the landscape which has got under way in the century since. It is this latter subject to which the chapter first turns. In the space available it is only possible to offer a swift outline of five broad areas in two broader groups, focused on key publications within them: writing on maps, agrarian change, the social consequences of that change, the aestheticization of landscape and the rise of tourism.