Wanderlust: A History of Walking (16 page)

Soon afterward, while Jane and Elizabeth are marooned at this worldly house, its inhabitants demonstrate the correct sort of walking—within the bounds of both garden shrubbery and society. Miss Bingley is still railing to Mr. Darcy about Elizabeth. “At that moment they were met from another walk, by Mrs. Hurst and Elizabeth herself.” Mrs. Hurst takes Mr. Darcy's disengaged arm and leaves Elizabeth to walk alone. “Mr. Darcy felt their rudeness and immediately said,—

“ ‘This walk is not wide enough for our party. We had better go into the avenue.'

“But Elizabeth, who had not the least inclination to remain with them, laughingly answered—

“ ‘No, no; stay where you are.—You are charmingly group'd, and appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth. Good bye.' ”

They have castigated her cross-country walk across the boundaries of decorum; she is mocking their garden propriety by suggesting that they have become part of the garden's array of aesthetic objects, objects that she can contemplate as
impersonally as trees and water. That evening Miss Bingley strolls about the narrower confines of the drawing room, where all the Netherfields characters but Jane are gathered. “Her figure was elegant, and she walked well,” says Austen. The acuity of idle people about each other's conduct extended to critiques of movement and posture, and a person's walk was considered an important part of his or her appearance. When she invites Elizabeth to join her, Mr. Darcy remarks that they walk either to discuss things privately or because “you are conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage in walking.” Walking can be for display, withdrawal, or both.

This novel and other novels of the time suggest that walking provided a shared seclusion for crucial conversations. Etiquette at the time required residents and guests of the country house to pass their day in the main rooms together, and the garden walk provided relief from the group, either in solitude or in tête-à-têtes (in a twist on this practice, modern political figures have often held crucial conversations on walks in order to avoid being bugged). Soon after Jane's recovery, she and Elizabeth gossip while walking in their own family's shrubbery. For
Pride and Prejudice
is also an incidental inventory of the types of landscape available to walk in. Toward the end of the book, further features of the Bennet gardens appear when Lady Catherine storms in to harangue Elizabeth about her intentions toward Mr. Darcy; “ ‘Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favour me with your company,' ” she dissembles, seeking private conversation. “ ‘Go, my dear,' cried her mother, ‘and shew her ladyship about the different walks. I think she will be pleased with the hermitage.' ” This lets us know that it is a mid-eighteenth-century garden of some size, with at least one architectural adornment in it.

What exactly Lady Catherine's park included we never learn, only that during her stay nearby Elizabeth's “favourite walk . . . was along the open grove which edged that side of the park, where there was a nice sheltered path, which no one seemed to value but herself, and where she felt beyond the reach of Lady Catherine's curiosity.” Not Mr. Darcy's, however: “More than once did Elizabeth in her ramble within the Park, unexpectedly meet Mr. Darcy.—She felt all the perverseness of the mischance.” She tells him it is her “favorite haunt,” for she still wishes to avoid him. He, of course, is in love with her and repeatedly joins her in the park seeking private conversation: “it struck her in the course of their third
rencontre that he was asking some odd unconnected questions—about her pleasure in being at Hunsford, her love of solitary walks . . .”

For the author and her readers, as for Mr. Darcy, these solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom. Though Austen has not nearly as much to say about scenery in this novel as in
Mansfield Park,
Elizabeth's sensitivity to landscape is another of the features that signifies her refined intelligence. It is not Mr. Darcy but Pemberly, his estate, that begins to change her mind about him, and walking in his park becomes a peculiarly intimate act. She “had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. . . . At that moment she felt, that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” Evidently a student of Gilpin, she inspects the view from each window of the house, and after they have left it to walk toward the river, the owner of both house and river appears. Her uncle “expressed a wish of going round the whole Park, but feared it might be beyond a walk. With a triumphant smile, they were told, that it was ten miles round.” Like Elizabeth's fondness for solitary walks, Mr. Darcy's possession of a magnificent naturalistic landscape evidently in the modern style of Capability Brown is a sign of character. When they unexpectedly meet in this landscape, a more civil and conscious relationship begins, as they “pursued the accustomed circuit; which brought them again, after some time, in a descent among hanging woods, to the edge of the water, in one of its narrowest parts. They crossed it by a simple bridge, in character with the general air of the scene . . . and the valley, here contracted into a glen, allowed room only for the stream, and a narrow walk amidst the rough coppice-wood which bordered it. Elizabeth longed to explore its windings. . . .”

It is this shared taste for scenery that finally provides the literal common ground on which they resolve their differences. Of course, the hero and heroine of the novel have been brought together in the glories of Pemberley because her aunt and uncle had offered to take her to the Lake District (to which Elizabeth “rapturously cried, ‘what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?' ”). Though Miss Bingley despises this aunt and uncle for being in trade and residing in an unfashionable part of London, they have demonstrated
their
refinement by
taking up this moderately avant-garde form of scenic tourism. The trip has been cut short, bringing them to Derbyshire and Pemberley, not far south of the Lakes, and gathering together all the most admirably conscious characters in the book. Austen interrupts the high abstract plane of her narration, in which only the most necessary details of the material world briefly intrude, to offer us luscious descriptions of Pemberley. Of the country in which it is located, she remarks, however, “It is not the object of this work to give a description of Derbyshire.” Still, she lists the magnificent estate of Chatsworth and the natural wonders of Dove Dale, Matlock, and the Peak as among the attractions these tourists have visited.

The multiplicity of walking's uses are notable in this novel. Elizabeth walks to escape society and to converse privately with her sister and, at the end of
Pride and Prejudice,
with her suitor. The landscapes she enjoys include old-fashioned and new gardens, wild landscapes of the north and Kentish countryside. She walks for exercise, as did Queen Elizabeth, for conversation, as did Samuel Pepys, and walks in gardens, as did Walpole and Pope. She walks in scenic spots as did Gray and Gilpin, and even walks for transportation, as did Moritz and the Wordsworths, and like them she meets with disapproval for it. Once or twice she promenades, as did they all. New purposes keep being added to the pedestrian repertoire, but none are dropped, so that the walk constantly increases in meanings and uses. It has become an expressive medium. It is also both socially and spatially the widest latitude available to the women contained within these social strictures, the activity in which they find a chance to exert body and imagination. On a walk where they manage to lose all their companions and “she went boldly on with him alone,” Elizabeth and Darcy finally come to an understanding, and their communications and newfound happiness take up so much time that “ ‘My dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?' was a question which Elizabeth received from Jane as soon as she entered the room, and from all the others when they sat down to table. She had only to say in reply, that they had wandered about, till she was beyond her own knowledge.” Consciousness and landscape have merged, so that Elizabeth has literally gone “beyond her own knowledge” into new possibilities. It is the last service the walk performs for the restless heroine of this novel.

Notable too are the many times in which walking appears as a noun rather than a verb in this book and in this era: “Within a short walk of Longbourn lived
a family”; “a walk to Meryton was necessary to amuse their morning hours”; “they had a pleasant walk of about half a mile across the park”; “her favourite walk . . . was along the open grove” and so forth. These uses of the word express that the walk is a set piece with known qualities, like a song or a dinner, and that in going on such a walk one does not merely move one's legs alternately but does so for a certain duration neither too long nor too short, for purposes sufficiently unproductive of anything but health and pleasure, in pleasing surroundings. The language implies a conscious attention to the refinement of everyday acts. People had always walked, but they had not always invested it with these formal meanings, meanings about to expand further.

The Romantic poets are popularly portrayed as revolutionaries breaking with everything that had come before. The young Wordsworth was radical in politics, as well as poetic style and subject matter, but he carried much polite eighteenth-century convention forward with him. Still in his mother's womb when Gray arrived in the Lake District, he helped further popularize the region's beauties, and though he was born on the edge of its steep, stony expanses, it was conventional aesthetics as well as personal associations that brought him back to live out the last fifty years of his life there. From Wales to Scotland to the Alps, Wordsworth chose already-celebrated landscapes to walk in and write about. He was, in some ways, the ideal tourist, a tourist with a unique gift for remembering and describing what he saw, and his relationship to the Lake District is an odd balancing act between the clear-eyed intimacy of the local and the enthusiasm of the tourist. He and his sister were consciously steeping themselves in the existing literature on landscape, educating themselves to see the same way Marianne Dashwood or Elizabeth Bennet might have, and bringing that sight into their everyday excursions. In 1794 Wordsworth asked his brother in London to send his books to him and singled out the volumes of Gilpin's Scottish and northern English tours as important to include. And in 1800, seven months after that long walk across the snow, Dorothy wrote in her journal, “In the morning, I read Mr Knight's
Landscape
[
The Landscape: A Didactic Poem,
quoted earlier]. After tea we rowed down to Loughrigg Fell, visited the white foxglove, gathered wild strawberries and
walked up to view Rydale. We lay a long time looking at the lake: the shores all embrowned with the scorching sun. The ferns were turning yellow, that is, here and there one was quite turned. We walked round by Benson's wood home. The lake was now most still, and reflected the beautiful yellow and blue and purple and grey colours of the sky.” The passage reads as though she took instruction in landscape in the morning and carried it out in the afternoon. It also illustrates the Wordsworths' most common kind of walking—not as travel but as daily outings in the region around them, in some respects like the daily garden walks of the ladies and gentlemen whose traditions they were extending, and in some respects radically different.

T
HE
L
EGS OF
W
ILLIAM
W
ORDSWORTH

“His legs were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that I ever heard lecture on that topic,” wrote Thomas De Quincey of William Wordsworth, with the mixture of admiration and animosity most of the next generation of poets brought to that looming presence. “There was no absolute deformity about them; and undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisition; for I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175 to 180,000 English miles—a mode of exertion, which to him, stood in the stead of wine, spirits, and all other stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which he has been indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his writings.” While others walked before and after him, and many other Romantic poets went on walking tours, Wordsworth made walking central to his life and art to a degree almost unparalleled before or since. He seems to have gone walking nearly every day of his very long life, and walking was both how he encountered the world and how he composed his poetry.

To understand his walking, it is important to break away from the idea of “the walk” as meaning a brief stroll about a pleasant place and from that other definition of the recent writers on Romantic walking, of walking as long-distance travel. For Wordsworth walking was a mode not of traveling, but of being. At twenty-one, he set off on a two-thousand-mile journey on foot, but during the
last fifty years of his life, he paced back and forth on a small garden terrace to compose his poetry, and both kinds of walking were important to him, as was cruising about the streets of Paris and of London, climbing mountains, and walking with sister and friends. All this walking found a way into his poetry. I could have written about his walking earlier, with the philosophical writers who made walking part of their thinking process, or later, when I turn to the histories of walking in the city. But he himself linked walking with nature, poetry, poverty, and vagrancy in a wholly new and compelling way. And of course Wordsworth himself emphatically valued the rural over the urban:

Happy in this, that I with nature walked

Not having a too early intercourse

With the deformities of crowded life. . . .

Too, he is the figure to which posterity looks in tracing the history of walking in the landscape: he has become a trailside god.

Born in 1770 in Cockermouth, just north of the more wild and steep scenery of the Lake District, Wordsworth liked in later years to portray himself as a simple man born amid a kind of pastoral republic of lakeland freeholders and shepherds. In fact, his father was the agent of Lord Lowther, an immensely wealthy despot who owned much of the region. The future poet was not yet eight when his mother died; Dorothy was sent away to be raised by relatives, and he himself was sent to school in Hawkshead, in the heart of the Lakes. The death of their father when Wordsworth was thirteen left the children dependent on the goodwill of unenthused relations, for Lord Lowther managed to deprive the five Wordsworth children of their legacy from this successful father for nearly twenty years. But the years at Hawkshead's excellent school were idyllic despite or perhaps because of all the family turmoil. There he set snares, ice-skated, climbed the cliffs for birds' eggs, boated, and walked incessantly, at night and often in the morning before school, when he and a friend would go the five miles around the nearby lake. Or so says
The Prelude,
his great autobiographical poem of several thousand lines, which even with its scrambled chronologies and deleted facts provides a spectacular portrait of the poet's early life. Called by his family “The Poem to Coleridge,” to whom it is addressed, it is also subtitled “The Growth of a Poet's Mind,” signifying exactly what kind of an autobiography it is, and it was
meant to be a prelude to a monumental philosophical poem
The Recluse,
of which only
The Prelude
and “The Excursion” were completed.

The Prelude
reads almost as a single long walk that, though interrupted, never altogether stops, and this recurrent image of the walker gives it continuity amid all its digressions and detours. One pictures Wordsworth like Christian in
Pilgrim's Progress
or Dante in the
Divine Comedy,
a small figure touring the whole world on foot, only this time around it is a world of lakes, dances, dreams, books, friendships, and many many places. The poem is also a kind of atlas of the making of a poet, showing us the role of this city and that mountain, for places loom larger than people. In the same respectfully spiteful vein as De Quincey remarking on Wordsworth's legs, the essayist William Hazlitt once quipped, “He sees nothing but himself and the universe.” In the history of English literature, the rise of the novel is often linked to the rise of awareness and interest about personal life—personal life as private thoughts, emotions and relations between people. Wordsworth went much further than the novels of his time in charting his own thoughts, emotions, memories, and relations to place, but his seems a curiously impersonal life, since he remains reticent on his personal relationships—thus Hazlitt's quip.

His passion for walking and for landscape seems to have originated in childhood, or been that curiosity so many children have, salvaged and refined into art in his later years, but the passion begins too early and goes too far to be merely the fashionable taste for admiring and describing landscapes. In the fourth of the
Prelude
's thirteen books, he describes walking home from an all-night dance somewhere in the Lakes, sometime in his late teens, to witness a dawn “more glorious than I had ever beheld.” Early on this morning, while “The sea was laughing at a distance; all / The solid mountains were as bright as clouds” he committed to his vocation as poet—“I made no vows but vows / Were then made for me”—and he became a “dedicated spirit. On I walked / In blessedness, which even yet remains.” In his early twenties, he seems to have set about to systematically fail at every alternative to being a poet and chosen wandering and musing as the preliminaries for realizing his vocation.

Should the guide I choose

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way,

he asserts amid the opening lines of this massive poem first finished in 1805, revised repeatedly during his lifetime, and only published after his death in 1850.

The turning point in both his life and
The Prelude
is his amazing 1790 walk with his fellow student Robert Jones across France into the Alps, when they should have been studying for their Cambridge University exams. Wordsworth's most recent biographer, Kenneth Johnston, dramatically declares, “With this act of disobedience his career as a Romantic poet may be said to have begun.” Travel has its rogue and rebel aspects—straying, going out of bounds, escaping—but this journey was as much a quest for an alternate identity as an escapade. The Grand Tour had been a standard feature of English gentlemen's educations; usually they went by coach to meet people of their own class and see the artworks and monuments of France and Italy. Those connoisseurs of gardens and landscapes Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray went on such a tour in 1739, where they each wrote excitedly of the Alps they crossed en route to Italy. To go on foot and to make Switzerland, rather than Italy, the destination of the trip expressed a radical shift in priorities, away from art and aristocracy toward nature and democracy. To go in 1790 meant joining the flood of radicals converging on Paris to breathe the heady atmosphere of the early days of the French Revolution, before the blood had begun to pour. The Alps themselves, already central objects in the cult of the landscape sublime, were part of the attraction, but so was Switzerland's republican government and its associations with Rousseau. Their final destination before they boated back down the Rhine was the island of Saint-Pierre, which Rousseau wrote about in the
Confessions
and the
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
as a version of the natural paradise. Rousseau is an obvious precursor for Wordsworth, who walked as both a means and an end—to compose and to be.

They had landed in Calais on July 13 and woke the next day to the joyous celebrations of the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, when France was “standing on top of golden hours / And human nature seeming born again.” They walked through

hamlets, towns,

Gaudy with relics of that festival,

Flowers left to wither on triumphal arcs, and window garlands. . . .

Unhoused beneath the evening star we saw

Dances of liberty, and in late hours

Of darkness, dances in the open air.

Wordsworth and Jones had charted their journey with care, however, and walked about thirty miles a day in order to carry out their ambitious plans:

A march it was of military speed

And earth did change her images and form

Before us fast as clouds are changed in heaven.

Day after day, up early and down late,

From vale to vale, from hill to hill we went,

From province on to province did we pass,

Keen hunters in a chase of fourteen weeks.

So vigorous were they that they crossed the Alps without realizing it, much to their disappointment. Already over the final pass and still thinking they had far higher to go, they had cut off on an uphill trail when a peasant set them straight and sent them to finish their descent into Italy, where they made a quick loop past Lake Como before reentering Switzerland. Wordsworth breaks off this narrative at Lake Como, but
The Prelude
recounts his returns to France in 1791, where his politics continued to develop.

It is entirely Wordsworthian that he tried to understand the Revolution by walking the streets of Paris and visiting “each spot of old and recent fame” from the “dust of the Bastille” to the Champ de Mars and Montmartre. Among the Britons he may have met there are Colonel John Oswald and “Walking Stewart,” two examples of a new kind of pedestrian. Johnston writes, “Oswald had traveled to India, become a vegetarian and nature mystic, walked back to Europe overland, thrown himself into the French Revolution with the direct intent of carrying it back to England.” He would later appear under his own surname in Wordsworth's early verse drama
The Borderers.
Stewart was a similar character whose nickname commemorated his remarkable walks—he too had walked back from India, as well as all over Europe and North America—but whose books were diatribes on other subjects. De Quincey wrote of Walking Stewart, “No region, pervious to human feet except, I think, China and Japan, but had been visited by Mr. Stewart in this philsophical style; a style which compels a man to move
slowly through a country, and to fall in continually with the natives of that country.” A third eccentric, John Thelwall (mentioned in chapter 2), suggests something of a pattern: autodidacts who took the trinity of radical politics, love of nature, and pedestrianism to extremes. Thelwall became well acquainted with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the early 1790s, and later in that decade, after he narrowly escaped hanging for his politics, sought refuge with them. Wordsworth owned a copy of Thelwall's
Peripatetic,
which amid its digressions on philosophy takes stock of the living and working conditions of the laborers being drawn into the beginnings of the industrial revolution. These characters suggest that traveling any distance on foot was the act of a political radical in England, expressing an unconventionality and a willingness to identify and be identified with the poor. Wordsworth himself wrote in a letter of 1795, “I have some thoughts of exploring the country westward of us, in the course of next summer, but in an humble evangelical way; to wit
à pied,
” and in
The Prelude
he wrote, “So like a peasant I pursue my way.”

To walk in this way summoned up Rousseau's complex equation of virtue with simplicity with childhood with nature. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, English aristocrats had linked nature with reason and the current social order, suggesting that things were as they should be. But nature was a dangerous goddess to enthrone. At the latter end of that century, Rousseau and romanticism equated nature, feeling, and democracy, portraying the social order as highly artificial and making revolt against class privilege “only natural.” In his history of eighteenth-century ideas of nature, Basil Willey remarks, “Throughout that turbulent time ‘Nature' remained the dominant concept,” but its meaning was protean. “The Revolution was made in the name of Nature, Burke attacked it in the name of Nature, and in
eodem nomine
Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and [radical philosopher William] Godwin replied to Burke.” To walk in the gracious and expensive confines of the garden was to associate walking, nature, the leisure classes, and the established order that secured that leisure. To walk in the world was to link walking with a nature aligned instead with the poor and whatever radicalism would defend their rights and interests. Too, if society deformed nature, then children and the uneducated were, in a radical reversal, the purest and the best. Wordsworth, perfect sponge of his age, soaks up these values and pours them forth as his extraordinary poetry of childhood—his own, and those of his many fictional characters—and of the poor. He took up Rousseau's task and
improved upon it, portraying rather than arguing a relationship between childhood, nature, and democracy. Though only the first two of this trinity are remembered by the worshipers of the trailside god, the third is central to at least the early work. “You know perhaps already that I am of that odious class of men called democrats,” he wrote a friend in 1794, continuing with a confidence that proved unwarranted, “and of that class I shall for ever continue.”