Global Gilpin: The Picturesque Takes a Tour
During the Romantic era, tourism—and picturesque tourism, in particular—gained popularity across the Continent. While William Gilpin’s enormously popular British domestic tours were circulating in the 1780s and 1790s, an intense debate about the nature of the picturesque was being waged, partly in response to Gilpin’s “authoritative judgements” on the topic (see Stephen Copley's essay "Gilpin on the Wye: Tourists, Tintern Abbey, and the Picturesque" in , ed. Michael Rosenthal, et. al, New Haven: Yale UP, 1997; 133).