The 1844 Railway issue (pro)
Wordsworth opposed the Kendal and Windermere railway, asking “Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?” This was a minority view with many people seeing it as an exciting new development. Richard Monckton Miles, writing in 1844, pointed out that it was partly due to Wordsworth’s own poetry that people were inspired to visit the Lakes. He also felt that Wordsworth could not begrudge workers, living in cramped cities, who wished to escape the daily grind: “And thou, the patriarch of these pleasant ways, / Canst hardly grudge that crowded streets send out, / In Sabbath glee, the sons of care and doubt, / To read these scenes by light of thine own lays.”
The Preston Guardian, on 30 November 1844, addressed the question of the impact of the railway bringing more visitors to the Lakes, and came to the following conclusion: ”all that would be changed, would be the solitude of the region. The lakes, the mountains, and the dales of Westmorland and Cumberland would retain all their pristine grandeur of outline, and beauty of aspect; but they would derive added cheerfulness from the sight of rejoicing human countenances, and the sounds of happy human voices.”
Harriet Martineau regarded the railways as bringers of much-needed new ideas. She wrote that many people lived in unsanitary conditions “in stench, huddled together in cabins, and almost without water... The railroads, which some have so much feared, will be no small blessing to the district if they bring strangers from a more enlightened region to abolish the town-evils, which harbour in the very heart of the mountains.”
James Baker Pyne, Lake Windermere from Orrest Head, 1849, oil, The
Wordsworth Trust.
Look closely and you can see Windermere Railway Station and two trains.