William Wordsworth's Guides to the Lake District

When we visited the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere, I had no idea that William Wordsworth had published guides to the Lake District. It was a display of the book above that was called A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England etc that caught my eye. It was described there as the Fifth Edition. The image below I found credited to Brigham Young University (more later).

What I really wanted to know was what had happened to the previous editions and the following study is a result of my researches. But Wordsworth was not the first to publish a guide to the Lakes. That is accredited to Thomas West in 1778. Here are all five editions in chronological order.

The First Edition

It was when Wordsworth's friend and artist  the Rev Joseph Wilkinson wanted an introduction to his 1810 series of engravings called Select Views of Cumbria, Westmoreland and Lancashire, Wordsworth obliged.  This is referred to as the First Edition of his Guide. The whole of Wordsworth's anonymous introduction to Select Views is on Romantic Circles website romantic-circles.org. Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (1810) | Romantic Circles (romantic-circles.org)

Here is the first page of Wordsworth's introduction.

The following is an extract from Romantic Circles website:

 In accepting the Select Views commission, Wordsworth had two distinct assignments. The first, offering a general survey of the Lake District, was fulfilled by his 34-page "introduction" . The second, describing vistas or landmarks featured in Wilkinson’s sketches, proved considerably more vexing. 

On the same website are a selection of the engravings by Joseph Wilkinson from this book of Select Views etc. " Gallery of Engravings of Joseph Wilkinson's Drawings". Here are a couple:

The one above is Elterwater and the one below of Rydal.

The Second Edition

It was in 1820 that similar words were included in Wordsworth's own book of poetry that was called The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets and this is referred to as the second edition.

The list of contents include the final line Topographical Description of the Country of The Lakes. The full text is on archive.org and credited to BYU.

The Third Edition

As interest in tourism to the Lake District increased, Wordsworth published in 1822 his own A Description of the Scenery of The Lakes in the North of England Third Edition, now first published separately, with additions, and illustrative remarks upon the scenery of the Alps.

Wordsworth was keen to note on the title page that this work was published separately to those earlier editions and that there were new additions. The full text can be found on:

https://archive.org/details/adescriptionsce01wordgoog/page/n3/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater

The Fourth Edition

A Fourth Edition came out  only a year later in 1823 with the same title as the Third Edition.

Go to: https://wordsworth250.byu.edu/about and there under "Exhibition Catalogue"  is A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England 4th Edition 1823". And below the front cover photo are the words This is the 4th edition of the work commonly known as Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes. It expands upon Wordsworth’s previously published descriptions of the Lake District (1810, 1820, 1822), the earliest of which appeared as the anonymous introduction to Joseph Wilkinson’s 1810 Select Views of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire and as an appendix to Wordsworth’s 1820 River Duddon volume of poems. 

The Fifth Edition

And so we come to the last of these editions as the pictures at the top. This is what is now called the definitive work: the Fifth Edition of 1835 that has the full title Guide through the District of The Lakes in the North of England with a Description of the Scenery, for the use of Tourists and Residents Fifth Edition with Considerable Additions by William Wordsworth 1835. It is this edition that the museum proudly displays. 

Summary

It had actually taken me a lot of research to get these facts and images into a positive chronological order. You would think that for such an important document it would be so simple to follow online. However the best link is "Wordsworth at BYU". This is an online Exhibition for the poet's 250th anniversary in 2020 by Brigham Young University in the USA. "A formal relationship with the Wordsworth Trust takes hundreds of BYU students each year into the heart of William Wordsworth’s Lake District".

I really would like to see the museum display all five editions set out in a row. When I first saw the fifth edition, I immediately thought that the previous editions would all have the same title, which I thought was usual in publications. But that is not so. Displaying all the editions side by side would dispel any such question. 

Guide books and maps have, to me, always been fascinating as the picture below might show. Wordsworth was one of the first in a long line of authorities on The Lake District to let us tourists get to know these wonderful fells.