Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Walking, Literature, and English Culture is a cultural history of walking in nineteenth-century England, assessing its importance in literature and in culture at large. Engaging with current debates about the relationship between industrialization and cultural production, and between technology and the picturesque, Anne Wallace examines the forces that transformed walking from an unwelcome fact of life to a celebrated activity for mind and body. Rereading Wordsworth in the context of contemporary changes in transport, agriculture, and aesthetics, she articulates a previously unacknowledged literary mode - peripatetic. Walking and its representation is set in terms of specific historical circumstances, for examples the rise of enclosure, which Wallace shows is partially undermined by the assertion of footpath rights. Her discussions move from eighteenth-century approaches to peripatetic through its varied uses in Victorian literature, notably in the work of Barrett Browning, Dickens, and Hardy. This is a major contribution to the study of rural English literature (and georgic), in which Anne Wallce demonstrates how a proper understanding of peripatetic significantly enriches our assessment of a text's relation to its culture. 'it provides an excellent survey of literary walkers and walkers in literature, and a most enticing bibliography. It is studded with unusual jewels.' Christina Hardyment, The Independent