This book explores William Wordsworth’s pervasive influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of transport revolutions, popular tourism, and the Great 1914-18 War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of travel. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage—a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period when the popularisation of motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of Romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. By revealing how Romantic ideas of nature, travel, liberty and self-reliance were re-interpreted and utilized in discourses on landscape, transport, accessibility, preservation, war and cultural heritage, this book portrays multiple Wordsworthian legacies in modern ways of perceiving and valuing the nature and culture of the Lake District.