Wanderlust: A History of Walking

by Rebecca Solnit

  For Gilpin was teaching people to look at landscape as pictures. Nowadays, his books give a sense of what a heady new pastime looking at landscape was and how much assistance was required. Gilpin tells his readers what to look for and how to frame it in the imagination. Of Scotland, for example, he declares, “Were it not for this general deficiency of objects, particularly of wood, in the Scotch views, I have no doubt but that they would rival those of Italy. The grand outlines are all laid in; a little finishing is all we want”—which is to say that the new subject of Scottish terrain can be understood through comparison to both art and the already hallowed landscapes of Italy. He wrote guidebooks to many parts of England, notably the Lake District, as well as to Wales and Scotland, enumerating the proper sites to visit. Others joined in; Richard Payne Knight wrote, in his abominable but influential 1794 Landscape: A Didactic Poem in Three Books, “Let us learn, in real scenes, to trace / The true ingredients of the painter’s grace.”

  Like the taste for landscape, the emphasis on the pictorial and the existence of scenic tourism seem unremarkable things to present-day readers, and yet they were all invented in the eighteenth century. The poet Thomas Gray’s celebrated Lake District tour of 1769 came two years after the first tourist came specifically to admire the scenery and write about it, and Gray wrote about it too. By the end of the century the Lakes were an established tourist destination, as they have remained since, thanks to Gilpin, Wordsworth—and Napoleon: English travelers who once might have gone abroad began to travel around their own island during the turmoil of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Tourists traveled by coach, then train (and eventually car and plane). They read their guidebooks. They looked at their landscapes. They bought souvenirs. And when they arrived, they walked. Originally, the walking seems to have been incidental, part of the process of moving around to find the best view. But by the turn of the century walking was a central part of some touristic ventures, and walking tours and mountain climbing were coming into being.

  IV. MUD ON HER PETTICOAT

  Though Jane Austen famously ignored the Napoleonic Wars in her novels, she pointedly addressed other topical subjects. In Northanger Abbey she mocked the current taste for the gothic novel, with its macabre and unlikely thrills, and in Sense and Sensibility she was almost as sarcastic about Marianne Dashwood’s romantic views on love and landscape. Later in her life, she seems to have accepted the cult of landscape far more, and in her late novel, Mansfield Park, she more than once equates the heroine’s sensitivity to natural beauty with her moral virtues. Her novels with their genteel young women in rural circumstances are also a wonderful index of the uses of the walk at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, and none so much as Pride and Prejudice. A tour of Elizabeth Bennet’s walks will close our inspection of the circumstances in which William and Dorothy Wordsworth set out for Grasmere in December of 1799 (and here it should be noted that though Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, the first version was composed in 1799). Austen was their peer, and she lets us glimpse the staid world they walked out on.

  Walks are everywhere in Pride and Prejudice. The heroine walks on every possible occasion and in every location, and many of the crucial encounters and conversations in the book take place while two characters are walking together. The very incidental role of the walks indicates how much a part of the fabric of everyday life walking was for such people as Austen’s genteel characters. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth in England, walking was a particularly feminine pursuit—“They were country ladies, and of course fond of the country lady’s amusement, walking,” wrote Dorothy Wordsworth in a letter in 1792. It was something to do. In the writings of men we find much about designing and admiring gardens, but it is in the letters and novels of women that we most often find people actually walking in them, perhaps because they address more minute daily life, or perhaps because Englishwomen—or, rather, ladies—had so few other activities open to them. Between social functions Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, reads copiously, writes letters, sews a little, plays the piano passably, and walks.

  Not long after the novel opens, Jane Bennet catches a cold riding to Netherfields, the house of her suitor Mr. Bingley, and her sister Elizabeth walks over to nurse her. Going by foot is in part an act of necessity, since she is “no horsewoman,” and only one horse, rather than a pair to pull the carriage, is available. But the bold verve that makes her so charming a heroine also makes her an avid walker—“I do not wish to avoid the walk. The distance is nothing when one has a motive; only three miles”—and the walk is the first major demonstration of her unconventionality. Though not going nearly as far as did Dorothy Wordsworth when reprimanded by her aunt, Elizabeth is likewise walking beyond the bounds of propriety for women of her class, and the characters at Mr. Bingley’s house have much to say about it. The transgression seems to be both that she went out into the world alone, and that she turned the idyll of the genteel walk into something utilitarian. “That she should have walked three miles so early in the day, in such dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt for it.” When she is out of earshot caring for her sister, who has become seriously ill, they expatiate on the mud on her petticoat and her “abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country town indifference to decorum.” Mr. Bingley, on the other hand, remarks that the unorthodox excursion “shews an affection for her sister that is very pleasing,” and Mr. Darcy notes that it has “brightened” her eyes.

  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 intention
s 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.

  V. OUT OF THE GATE

  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.

  Chapter 7

  THE LEGS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  “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.