Academic literature on the topic 'Herbert (District)'

Chapter 7 explores how the cultural identity of the Lake District was redefined and preserved after the First World War through two trends: new global tourism, and the advent of outdoor movements. First it focuses on foreign visitors, including American and Japanese tourists, who have made no slight contribution to the re-invention of ‘Wordsworth Country’. Then it explores some of the new walkers’ guides, including those by William Thomas Palmer, Maxwell Fraser and Henry Herbert Symonds, that were particularly attuned to foot-stepping through Wordsworth’s Lake District and encouraged readers to go back to Romantic pedestrianism. The chapter also pays attention to how the hiking and cycling boom among urban working classes changed the tourist landscape in the Lake District, becoming the driving force behind conservation and access campaigns and the new National Parks movement. Taken as a whole, the chapter investigates how Wordsworth’s legacy was preserved and then rehabilitated in the interwar era of mass motoring.

This chapter examines the period from 1880–1914 when the West End was established as theatreland. This was characterized by a huge wave of theatre building with new stages servicing the masses who were flooding into the district. Theatre was dominated by the titanic figures of Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Shows would also tour, benefiting from the information that they had first been seen in the West End, thus enhancing the glamorous reputation of the district. The chapter argues that the West End stage was often conservative and reflected the values of Lord Salisbury’s Britain. It considers the West End theatre business in its different forms (including the world of the West End audience and the theatre critic) and builds to a case study of the rebuilt Her Majesty’s Theatre which exemplified many of the trends in the late-Victorian theatre world.

This chapter develops the tensions inherent in Synge’s early works towards an understanding of his formal innovation, asserting the ‘time pressure’ of his one-act plays as a dimension of his response to modernity. Synge’s drafts for various articles, particularly ‘The Old and New in Ireland’, and an article on social change in Wicklow, combine with his notes on Herbert Spencer and evolutionary theory to show a writer deeply conscious of modernization and literature’s responsiveness to modernity. Contributing to and drawing on new work on the spatial and temporal dimensions of modernism, this chapter shows that the structures and plots and Synge’s one-act plays Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen are rooted in a battle of temporalities. By comparing the timescales of Synge’s one-act plays to those of his Revivalist contemporaries, this chapter shows that his reading in sociology, philosophy, and evolutionary science, alongside his experiences in the modernizing ‘Congested Districts’ of Ireland, fundamentally affected his literary output. Fractured communal relations are figured as fractures in the time frames of the drama, and the overlapping of temporalities and levels of modernization find their correlatives in the constant and unresolved competition for dominance from any one conception of time. These plays, far from being isolated from the concerns of modernization, or from reverting to a solely romanticized vision of the peasantry, in fact register a sense of formal instability as a result of their fraught and multiple conceptions of time and space.