This fascinating and original study shows that the English tourist industry is not a peculiarly modern creation. Concentrating on four types of perennial tourist attraction - literary shrines, country houses, picturesque ruins, and the natural landscape - Ian Ousby identifies the canons of taste that made them objects of fashionable attention in the eighteenth-century, and records how they acquired the trappings of the full-blown tourist attraction. He traces the development not just of an industry but of a state of mind - marked from its earliest days by the haunting fear that tourism spoils and maybe even destroys the very things it most admires. The Englishman's England is highly illustrated throughout.