The New York dance critic Edwin Denby wrote, about the same time as Rudofsky, of his own appreciation of Italian walkers. “In ancient Italian towns the narrow main street at dusk becomes a kind of theatre. The community strolls affably and looks itself over. The girls and the young men, from fifteen to twenty-two, display their charm to one another with a lively sociability. The more grace they show the better the community likes them. In Florence or in Naples, in the ancient city slums the young people are virtuoso performers, and they do a bit of promenading any time they are not busy.” Of young Romans, he wrote, “Their stroll is as responsive as if it were a physical conversation.” Elsewhere, he instructs dance students to watch the walk of various types: “Americans occupy a much larger space than their actual bodies do. This annoys many Europeans; it annoys their instinct of modesty. But it has a beauty of its own, that a few of them appreciate. . . . For myself I think the walk of New Yorkers is amazingly beautiful, so large and clear.” In Italy walking in the city is a universal cultural activity rather than the subject of individual forays and accounts. From Dante pacing out his exile in Verona and Ravenna to Primo Levi walking home from Auschwitz, Italy has not lacked great walkers—but urban walking itself seems to be more part of a universal culture than the focus of particular experience (save that by foreigners, copiously recorded, and the cinematic strolls of such characters as the streetwalker in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria and the protagonists in Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief and in many of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films). However, the cities that are neither so accommodating as Naples nor so forbidding as Los Angeles—London, New York—have produced their own fugitive culture of walking. In London, from the eighteenth century on, the great accounts of walking have to do not with the cheerful and open display of ordinary life and desires but with nocturnal scenes, crimes, sufferings, outcasts, and the darker side of the imagination, and it is this tradition that New York assumes.
In 1711 the essayist Joseph Addison wrote, “When I am in a serious Humour, I very often walk by my self in Westminster Abbey; where the Gloominess of the Place, and the Use to which it is applied . . . are apt to fill the Mind with a kind of Melancholy, or rather Thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable.” At the time he wrote, walking the city streets was perilous, as John Gay pointed out in his 1716 poem Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London. Travel through the city was as dangerous as cross-country travel: the streets were full of sewage and garbage, many of the trades were filthy, the air was already bad, cheap gin had ravaged the city’s poor the way crack did American inner cities in the 1980s, and an under-class of criminals and desperate souls thronged the streets. Carriages jostled and mangled pedestrians without fear of reprisal, beggars solicited passersby, and street sellers called out their wares. The accounts of the time are full of the fears of the wealthy to go out at all and of young women lured or forced into sexual labor: prostitutes were everywhere. This is why Gay focuses on urban walking as an art—an art of protecting oneself from splashes, assaults, and indignities:
Though you through cleanlier allies wind by day,
To shun the hurries of the publick way,
Yet ne’er to those dark paths by night retire;
Mind only safety, and contemn the mire.
Like Dr. Johnson’s 1738 poem “London,” Gay’s Trivia uses a classical model to mock the present. Divided into three books—the first on the implements and techniques of walking the streets, the second on walking by day, the third on walking by night—the poem makes it clear that the minutia of everyday life can only be observed scornfully. The high-flown style cannot but contrast abrasively with such small subjects, with something of the same mockery he brought to his Beggars’ Opera. Gay tries—
Here I remark each walker’s diff’rent face,
And in their look their various bus’ness trace.
—but he ends by despising everyone, assuming he can read their tawdry lives in their faces. At the end of Gay’s century Wordsworth “goes forward with the crowd,” seeing a mystery in the face of each stranger; while William Blake wanders “each charter’d street / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe:”—the cry of a chimney sweep, the curse of a young harlot. Earlier eighteenth-century literary language was not supple enough or personal enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street. Johnson had been one of those desperate London walkers in his early years there—in the late 1730s, when he and his friend, the poet and rogue Richard Savage, were too poor to pay for lodgings, they used to walk the streets and squares all night talking insurrection and glory—but he didn’t write about it. Boswell did in his Life of Johnson, but for Boswell, the darkness of night and anonymity of the streets were a less reflective opportunity, as his London diary records: “I should have been at Lady Northumberland’s rout tonight, but my barber fell sick [meaning his hair was not properly powdered]; so I sallied to the streets, and just at the bottom of our own, I picked up a fresh, agreeable young girl called Alice Gibbs. We went down a lane to a snug place. . . .” Of Alice Gibbs’s impression of the streets and the night, we have no record.
That few women other than prostitutes were free to wander the streets and that wandering the street was often enough to cause a woman to be considered a prostitute are matters troubling enough to be taken up elsewhere. Here I merely want to comment on their presence in the street and in the night, habitats in which they more than almost any other kind of walker became natives. Until the twentieth century women seldom walked the city for their own pleasure, and prostitutes have left us almost no records of their experience. The eighteenth century was immodest enough to have a few famous novels about prostitutes, but Fanny Hill’s courtesan life was all indoors, Moll Flanders’s was entirely practical, and both of them were creations of male authors whose work was at least partly speculative. Then as now, however, a complex culture of working the streets must have existed, each city mapped according to safety and the economics of male desire. There have been many attempts to confine such activity; Byzantine-era Constantinople had its “street of harlots,” Tokyo from the seventeenth to the twentieth century had a gated pleasure district, nineteenth-century San Francisco had its notorious Barbary Coast, and many turn-of-the-century American cities had red-light districts, the most famous of which was New Orleans’s Storyville, where jazz is reputed to have been born. But prostitution wandered outside these bounds, and the population of such women was enormous: 50,000 in 1793, when London had a total population of one million, estimated one expert. By the mid-nineteenth century they were to be found in the most fashionable parts of London too: social reformer Henry Mayhew’s report refers to “the circulating harlotry of the Haymarket and Regent Street,” as well as to the women working in the city’s parks and promenades.
Twenty-odd years ago a researcher on prostitution reported, “Prostitution streetscapes are composed of strolls, loosely defined areas where the women solicit. . . . On the stroll the prostitute moves around to entice or enjoin customers, reduce boredom, keep warm and reduce visibility [to the police]. Part of most streetscapes resemble common greens, areas to which all have unimpeded access. Here women assemble in groups of two to four, laughing, talking and joking among themselves. . . . Working the same stroll infuses much needed predictability into an illegal, sometimes dangerous environment.” And Dolores French, an advocate for prostitutes’ rights, worked the streets herself and reports that her fellow streetwalkers “think that women who work in whorehouses have too many restrictions and rules” while the street “welcomed everyone democratically. . . . They felt they were like cowboys out on the range, or spies on a dangerous mission. They bragged about how free they were. . . . They had no one to answer to but themselves.” The same refrains—freedom, democracy, danger—come up in this as in the other ways of occupying the streets.
In the eighteenth-century city, a new image of what it means to be human had arisen, an image of one possessed of the freedom
and isolation of the traveler, and travelers, however wide or narrow their scope, became emblematic figures. Richard Savage proposed this early with a 1729 poem called The Wanderer; and the aptly named George Walker inaugurated the new century with his novel The Vagabond, followed in 1814 by Fanny Burney’s Wanderer. Wordsworth had his Excursion (whose first two sections were titled “The Wanderer” and “The Solitary”); Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was condemned like the Wandering Jew to roam; and the Wandering Jew himself was a popular subject for Romantics in Britain and on the continent.
The literary historian Raymond Williams remarks, “Perception of the new qualities of the modern city had been associated, from the beginning, with a man walking, as if alone, in its streets.” He cites Blake and Wordsworth as founders of this tradition, but it was De Quincey who wrote of it most poignantly. In the beginning of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, De Quincey tells of how at the age of seventeen he had run away from a dull school and his unsympathetic guardians and landed in London. There he was afraid to contact the few people he knew and unable to seek work without connections. So for sixteen weeks in the summer and fall of 1802 he starved, having found no other support in London but a home in an all-but-abandoned mansion whose other resident was a forlorn female child. He fell into a spectral existence shared with a few other children, and he wandered the streets restlessly. Streets were already a place for those who had no place, a site to measure sorrow and loneliness in the length of walks. “Being myself at that time, of necessity, a peripatetic, or walker of the streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are technically called street-walkers. Many of these women had occasionally taken my part against watchmen who wished to drive me off the steps of houses where I was sitting.” He was befriended by one, a girl named Ann—“timid and dejected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of her young heart”—who was younger than he and who had turned to the streets after being cheated of a minor inheritance. Once when they were “pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and after a day when I had felt unusually ill and faint, I requested her to turn off with me into Soho Square,” and he fainted. She spent what little she had on hot spiced wine to revive him. That he was never able to find her again after his fortune changed was, he declares, one of the great tragedies of his life. For De Quincey, his sojourn in London was one of the most deeply felt passages in his long life, though it had no sequel: the rest of his book is given over to its putative subject, the effects of opium, and the rest of his life to rural places.
Charles Dickens was different, in that he chose such urban walking and his writing explored it thoroughly over the years. He is the great poet of London life, and some of his novels seem as much dramas of place as of people. Think of Our Mutual Friend, where the great euphemistic piles of dust, the dim taxidermy and skeleton shop, the expensively icy interiors of the wealthy, are portraits of those associated with them. People and places become one another—a character may only be identified as an atmosphere or a principle, a place may take on a full-fledged personality. “And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly,” wrote one of his best interpreters, G. K. Chesterton. He attributed Dickens’s acute sense of place to the well-known episode in his boyhood when his father was locked up in a debtor’s prison and Dickens himself was put to work in a blacking factory and lodged in a nearby roominghouse, a desolate child abandoned to the city and its strangers. “Few of us understand the street,” Chesterton writes. “Even when we step into it, we step into it doubtfully, as into a house or room of strangers. Few of us see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only—the street-walker or the street arab, the nomads who, generation after generation have kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of us know less. The street at night is a great house locked up. But Dickens had, if ever man had, the key of the street. . . . He could open the inmost door of his house—the door that leads onto the secret passage which is lined with houses and roofed with stars.” Dickens is among the first to indicate all the other things urban walking can be: his novels are full of detectives and police inspectors, of criminals who stalk, lovers who seek and damned souls who flee. The city becomes a tangle through which all the characters wander in a colossal game of hide and seek, and only a vast city could allow his intricate plots so full of crossed paths and overlapping lives. But when he wrote about his own experiences of London, it was often an abandoned city.
“If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should explode and perish,” he once told a friend, and he walked so fast and far that few ever managed to accompany him. He was a solitary walker, and his walks served innumerable purposes. “I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road,” he introduces himself in his essay collection The Uncommercial Traveller. “Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London.” This metaphysical version of the commercial traveler is an inadequate description of his role, and he tried on many others. He was an athlete: “So much of my travelling is done on foot, that if I cherished better propensities, I should probably be found registered in sporting newspapers under some such title as the Elastic Novice, challenging all eleven stone mankind to competition in walking. My last special feat was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day, pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country to breakfast. The road was so lonely in the night that I fell asleep to the monotonous sound of my own feet, doing their regular four miles an hour.” And a few essays later, he was a tramp, or a tramp’s son: “My walking is of two kinds: one straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond. In the latter state, no gypsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural to me, and strong with me, that I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp.” And he was a cop on the beat, too ethereal to arrest anyone but in his mind: “It is one of my fancies, that even my idlest walk must always have its appointed destination. . . . On such an occasion, it is my habit to regard my walks as my beat, and myself as a higher sort of police-constable doing duty on the same.”
And yet despite all these utilitarian occupations and the throngs who populate his books, his own London was often a deserted city, and his walking in it a melancholy pleasure. In an essay on visiting abandoned cemeteries, he wrote, “Whenever I think I deserve particularly well of myself, and have earned the right to enjoy a little treat, I stroll from Covent-garden into the City of London, after business-hours there, on a Saturday, or—better yet—on a Sunday, and roam about its deserted nooks and corners.” But the most memorable of them all is “Night Walks,” the essay that begins, “Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights.” He described these walks from midnight till dawn as curative of his distress, and during them “I finished my education in a fair amateur experience of houselessness”—or what is now called homelessness. The city was no longer as dangerous as it had been in Gay’s and Johnson’s time, but it was lonelier. Eighteenth-century London was crowded, lively, full of predators, spectacles, and badinage between strangers. By the time Dickens was writing about houselessness in 1860, London was many times as large, but the mob so feared in the eighteenth century had in the nineteenth been largely domesticated as the crowd, a quiet, drab mass going about its private business in public: “Walking the streets under the pattering rain, Houselessness would walk and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of streets, save at a corner, here and there, two policemen in conversation, or the sergeant or inspector looking after his men. Now and then in the night—but rarely—Houseles
sness would become aware of a furtive head peering out of a doorway a few yards before him, and, coming up with the head, would find a man standing bolt upright to keep within the doorway’s shadow, and evidently intent upon no particular service to society. . . . The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the river.” And yet he relishes the lonely nocturnal streets, as he does the graveyards and “shy neighborhoods” and what he quixotically called “Arcadian London”—London out of season, when society had gone en masse to the country, leaving the city in sepulchural peace.
There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude—a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars. In the country one’s solitude is geographical—one is altogether outside society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the nonhuman. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one’s secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries. This uncharted identity with its illimitable possibilities is one of the distinctive qualities of urban living, a liberatory state for those who come to emancipate themselves from family and community expectation, to experiment with subculture and identity. It is an observer’s state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life’s most refined pleasures.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 25