Walking, Literature, and English Culture

Abstract

This book is a cultural history of walking in 19th-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, the book examines the forces that transformed walking from an unwelcomed fact of life to a celebrated activity for mind and body. Rereading Wordsworth in the context of contemporary changes in transport, agriculture, and aesthetics, it articulates a previously unacknowledged literary mode — peripatetic. Walking and its representation is set in terms of specific historical circumstances, for example the rise of enclosure, which the book shows is partially undermined by the assertion of footpath rights. The discussions move from 18th-century approaches to peripatetic through its varied uses in Victorian literature, notably in the work of Barrett Browning, Dickens, and Hardy. The book demonstrates how a proper understanding of peripatetic significantly enriches our assessment of a text's relation to its culture.