Pedestrianism and Peripatetic Form

Abstract

So far, in surveying the rise of pedestrianism and analysing the profile of the pedestrian traveller, I have referred chiefly to the prose tours, of varying degrees of factuality, that were the most obvious literary product of the transvaluation of walking in British cultural life. In this chapter I want to shift the focus to poetry, with a rearward look at the eighteenth century, within the context of a broader project of exploring the characteristics of ‘peripatetic form’ as this emerges in more sophisticated literary works in the Romantic period. However, I want to begin where I left off at the end of Chapter 2, with the picturesque, because there remain some unvisited areas of overlap between that way of looking at the landscape, and the mobile perspectives of pedestrian travel, that provide a useful entry to the aesthetic issues I intend to explore.