us to understand that they might have been disembodied spirits, taking aerial flights among mountain solitudes, and independent of the physical machinery of legs and stomachs.
Now, gazing up at the startlingly abrupt Box Hill, it is extremely easy to envisage Stephen, with his own ‘physical machinery of legs and stomachs’, leading his followers with cries of enthusiasm up those vertiginous paths. In the late Victorian era, Stephen’s emphasis on the physicality of walking found an answering echo elsewhere in the country. In Lancashire, one Dr James Johnston gathered a rambling group together dedicated to the works of American poet Walt Whitman. The poet’s work was filled with the exultation of nature, and the sense of man engaging fully with the wildness around him. The Lancashire walkers who devoured Whitman’s poetry even inaugurated a Bolton ‘Whitman Day’.5 There was the sense here of a Victorian middle-class association celebrating the virtue of vigour, but also to a degree intellectualising it. Not merely was it necessary for gentlemen to explore their physical limits, they had to do so while engaged in serious discussions to do with philosophy and religious belief. As A. H. Sidgwick wrote:
Leave the intimate character of your surroundings to penetrate slowly into your higher faculties, aided by the consciousness of physical effort, the subtle rhythm of your walk, the feel of the earth beneath your feet, and the thousand intangible influences of sense.
Lovely though the Surrey countryside is – a porcelain miniature, compared to Derbyshire’s ceramic vase – one cannot entirely abandon oneself to the thousand intangible influences of sense. It is interesting how many hardcore walkers still view Surrey as something not quite worth bothering with. As I emerge from the National Trust woodland and plod happily back to the railway station, I realise that I have had a good, vigorous two-hour walk among fabulously old, gnarled yews, and can still be back in London in time for lunch. I raise my hat to the aesthetic good sense of Sir Leslie Stephen and his companions.
In this branch of the walking movement, as well as all the others, there never seemed to be any question that rambling was a balm to the body and soul that all should be free to enjoy. Yet there was a corresponding darkness too. We see it especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for those were years when some walkers were more vulnerable than others, and some had little choice about the location of their rambles. The act of walking sometimes had its savage underside, rooted in poverty, despair and madness.
CHAPTER 4
A Swift Detour: To Briefly Examine Walkers as Deviants, Outcasts and Fugitives – and as Doomed, Wandering Souls
The walker is not always welcome. A stranger arriving on foot in a small community has the power to alarm. In some corners of literature, particularly the Gothic, the solitary tramper is frequently presented as a figure of menace. Preacher Harry Powell in Davis Grubb’s novel Night of the Hunter is released from prison, intent upon hunting down a fortune hidden by an executed man. This money has been left with the man’s children John and Pearl, and the first these children know of Preacher Powell’s sinister arrival in their little town is the sound of his footsteps in the foggy night, walking up and down the street outside their house, casting a vast shadow on their bedroom wall as he sings a gospel hymn. The solitary walker sometimes has mythic qualities. Joseph Maturin’s popular 1830 Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer features a figure who has sold his soul to the Devil in return for an extra 150 years of life and is now wandering the earth in search of someone to swap the bargain with. This, in turn, was an echo of the medieval Christian legend of the Wandering Jew. After insulting Jesus as he carried the Cross along the Via Dolorosa, he was doomed to walk all the continents until the time of the Second Coming. Again, we see the idea of walking as something uncanny, connected with rootlessness and a certain moral ambiguity.
As much as the Romantic poets and subsequent Victorian enthusiasts proselytised about the virtues of walking in real life, there was always another side to it; the sense that walking could also be transgressive. The sense, also, that a certain class of walkers somehow symbolically offended a certain social order, and could be viewed by some as threatening. That class of walker, inevitably, was either labouring, or entirely dispossessed. So, running in parallel with the soaring poetic fancies are also accounts – both real and fictional – of the poor and the wretched walking, almost literally, on the fringes of society.
After the Enclosure Acts, there was very much an element of necessity, and of transgression around the entire subject of walking. In centuries past, only the wealthy middle and upper classes could undertake the sorts of tours that everyone now takes for granted. Poor people stayed close to their own communities and were often legally obliged to do so. In the seventeenth century one needed a licence to walk to another village in search of work or lodgings. Even then, there were those who looked upon even the more genteel class of walkers with a combination of distrust and horror. In 1793, German writer Karl Philipp Moritz was staying with a friend in Richmond, Surrey. He announced his intention to walk to Oxford. His friend was ‘greatly astonished’. Nonetheless, Moritz set off. Just a couple of miles in, while enquiring if he was going in the right direction for Oxford, he was told ‘you’ll want a carriage to get you there.’ Undaunted, he struck off on a ‘fine broad road’ into the countryside, bordered with ‘lovely green hedges’. But as the miles wore on, he found that every passing coachman was asking if he wanted a lift on the outside of their vehicle, and every farm-worker he passed looked at him in puzzlement. On top of this, he added: ‘When I passed through a village, the old women in their bewilderment would let out a “God almighty!”’
There is a similar distrust and impatience on show in Dickens’ 1841 novel The Old Curiosity Shop when saintly Little Nell and her grandfather are compelled to flee London to escape the nightmarish demands of Daniel Quilp upon the pair of them. Initially, it seems to both Nell and the narrator that away from the London stews and the vice lies a bucolic world of innocence and ease, which they will find even though they are travelling on foot. This illusion of yearning immediately dissipates. The little girl and her kleptomaniac grandfather walk across much of England, fleeing from parish to parish, through nightmare industrial landscapes, meeting various colourful characters, and an increasing amount of peril. As the novel – and their walk – progresses, its lethal nature becomes ever more apparent:
The child walked with more difficulty than she had led her companion to expect, for the pains that racked her joints were of no common severity, and every exertion increased them. But they wrung from her no complaint, or look of suffering; and though the two travellers proceeded very slowly, they did proceed.
Even though they find sanctuary in the end with a kindly schoolmaster in a small village, it is all too late for Little Nell. The walk has broken her. Her journey must soon come to its end. This is an extreme example, but for an author who was himself so enthusiastic about walking, he has the activity often spelling great hardship for his characters. There is Oliver Twist, on the run from the funeral parlour and the Beadle, on his way to London, almost starving in the process. There is Nicholas Nickleby and crippled Smike, struggling their way across the wintry wastes of the Yorkshire moors. David Copperfield features a harrowing journey when the young boy David takes it upon himself to walk from London to Dover, a journey of about seventy miles. Along the way, he is swindled, threatened, and gradually has to sell off his clothes to rascally second-hand traders in order to pay for food. His feet are sore with the unaccustomed exercise, his face is white with chalk, his hair dusty and tangled; he is forced to sleep beneath the stars. Worse yet, though, are his fellow pedestrians. We are left in no doubt that among the lower classes, walking is not merely a token of great poverty, but also the last redoubt of the low-down drunken bully.
Things are different for Victorian literature’s country folk, but even then, long epic walks tend to mirror quite vivid physical and emotional states. In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, walking is the natural mode of transport in places such as the Vale of Blackmoor. Indeed, in the summer months, it is seen as a source of pleasure: witness Angel
