When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Henry David Thoreau1
Being a leisurely walker in the so-called countryside is historically unusual behaviour […] Those out walking in the countryside have been mostly regarded as poor, mad or criminal. John Urry2
In the final decades of the eighteenth century, popular attitudes to walking underwent a profound reversal. Within the space of a single generation, an activity previously regarded as little more than a consequence of economic necessity became something altogether different; walking became a pleasure not a chore, the preserve of the leisured classes and not merely the poor. This rediscovery of walking was partly the result of a newly evolving view of the traveller as a distinct type, itself a consequence of improvements in roads and transport, which allowed the kinds of touring previously enjoyed in Continental Europe to develop a domestic equivalent. These changes were to prove deep-rooted, for behind the superficial fluctuations of fashion, the common perception of nature itself was undergoing a transition, as landscapes hitherto regarded as unrewarding came to be viewed as spiritual and liberating.
The philosophical foundations underpinning this shift in visual awareness originated in the influence of Rousseau and were soon to find expression in the emergence of the Romantic Movement. But these sentiments were most clearly articulated by the then influential figure of the Reverend William Gilpin. It was Gilpin who, in the 1770s, had first developed the idea of the picturesque, popularising a new method of viewing our environment, through which the intrepid traveller was sent out into the wilds of the British countryside to engage in sublime communion with the rugged and untamed landscapes to be found there. Gilpin’s work was itself part of a wider trend for travel narratives in the late eighteenth century that set about transforming our understanding of the British Isles in general, and Scotland, North Wales and the Lake District in particular. Soon the act of walking had given way to the walking-tour, and for the first time the figure of the pedestrian could be observed in his natural habitat.
I regret much not having been made acquainted with your wish to have employed your vacation in a pedestrian tour, both on your own account – as it would have contributed greatly to exhilarate your spirits – and on mine, as we should have gained much from the addition of your society. Letter from William Wordsworth to William Mathews, Plas-yn-Llan, August 13, 17913
This extract from Wordsworth’s letter to his friend William Mathews in 1791 contains the first recorded usage of the word pedestrian, in its adjectival form, to capture the literal sense of being on foot. And few people, if any, before or since, have come close to Wordsworth in replicating the extent to which he was to become a living expression of this term. Wordsworth’s dominant position within the canon of literary walkers is unchallenged; his crucial role in shaping our perceptions of the English landscape is unarguable. Indeed, so accustomed are we to associating Wordsworth’s poetry with an idealised image of the English countryside, preserved through the increasingly symbolic representation of a landscape long since diminished, that he has been called the Patron Saint of the Natural Trust.4 Yet if De Quincey’s description is to be trusted, Wordsworth’s stature as poet and walker was not reflected in his physical appearance:
To begin with his figure: - Wordsworth was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that I ever heard lecture on that topic; not that they were bad in any way which would force itself upon your notice – 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. But, useful as they have proved themselves, the Wordsworthian legs were certainly not ornamental; and it was really a pity, as I agreed with a lady in thinking, that he had not another pair for evening dress parties – when no boots lend their friendly aid to masque our imperfections from the eyes of female rigorists.5
If Wordsworth’s extraordinary career as poet and pedestrian can be captured within a single work, then it is his prodigious feat of textual endurance, The Prelude (1850), which most faithfully records his twofold obsession with, what were for him, the indissoluble acts of walking and composition. First completed in 1805 and, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, subsequently polished and revised over the course of his life, The Prelude was first published posthumously in 1850, the year of Wordsworth’s death. In many ways a walker’s autobiography, The Prelude offers a portrait of the walker as a young man, as Wordsworth recalls the nocturnal wanderings of his schooldays: ‘twas my joy’, he writes, ‘To wander half the night among the Cliffs/ And the smooth Hollows […] For I would walk alone/ In storm and tempest, or in starlight nights/ Beneath the quiet heavens6; while later in the poem, he expresses his good fortune in having been close to nature from an early age: ‘Happy in this, that I with nature walked/ Not having a too early intercourse/ With the deformities of crowded life.’7 And it was the continuation of this childhood habit, along with his almost mystical rapport with the natural world, which was to provide the basis for his lifelong philosophy:
I love a public road: few sights there are
That please me more; such object hath had power
O’er my imagination since the dawn
Of childhood, when its disappearing line,
Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep
Beyond the limits which my feet had trod,
Was like a guide in to eternity,
At least to things unknown and without bound.8
The turning point in Wordsworth’s life, or at least the first milestone in his career as poet and pedestrian, was to come in 1790 when, aged twenty, he embarked upon his first major walking-tour. Accompanied by his friend and fellow student, Robert Jones, such a tour would soon become a staple part of undergraduate life, but in 1790 such a journey was regarded as both ‘mad and impracticable.’9 Covering more than 350 miles in the first fortnight, the next two months saw Wordsworth and his companion cross Europe at a rate of some thirty miles a day, through France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, an incursion through Continental Europe that was, once again, to be recalled in The Prelude:
’Tis not my present purpose to retrace
That variegated journey step by step:
A march it was of military speed,
And earth did change her images and forms
Before us, fast as clouds are changed in Heaven.
Day after day, up early and down late,
From vale to vale, from hill to hill we went,
From Province on to Province did we pass,
Keen hunters in a chace of fourteen weeks10
The culmination of this tour was a visit to the Island of Sainte-Pierre in Switzerland, described by Rousseau in the fifth walk of his Reveries as something of a natural paradise. Indeed, Wordsworth appears to have been overcome by a similarly rapturous response himself, writing to his sister on his return: ‘I am a perfect enthusiast in my admiration of Nature in all her various forms.’11
If, then, Wordsworth can be seen as a natural successor to Rousseau, he also inherits something of Rousseau’s melancholic outlook; for despite the young man’s reverie, the figure of the walker in Wordsworth’s early work shares none of the intoxication with the natural world that he himself was to experience. On the contrary, the walker is invariably portrayed as a figure of social alienation, divorced both from his society and his surroundings. Hence, in place of the vigorous pedestrian, Wordsworth’s early poems are peopled by the marginalised and dispossessed: the outlaw and the murderer, the abandoned woman, discharged soldiers, beggars and gypsies.12
Unlike John Clare, Wordsworth had little to fear from being mistaken for a gypsy poacher himself, or being prosecuted as a vagrant as he travelled along the public road; and yet his poetry displays both a fascination with these figures and an identification with their suffering. Indeed, it is precisely this awareness of the common ground between them that allows him to elevate walking to the status of a democratic act, a unifying practice through which the social divisions of the day may be challenged and overcome.13 Yet Wordsworth’s poetry also emphasises the distinction between the tourist and the traveller, the leisurely walker and the labourer, as he attempts to redefine the act of walking; establishing an entirely new kind of peripatetic verse in which the act of walking takes on the regular, repetitive metre not of the pedestrian but of the labourer. Here, the act of walking has become a metaphor for the working of the land, a restless, mechanical activity divorced from mental processes, an act of physical production whose output is measured in verse:
A length of open space where I might walk
Backwards and forwards long as I had liking
In easy and mechanic thoughtlessness14
Wordsworth’s own walks soon came to reflect this new aesthetic, and after the age of thirty the epic touring of his youth gave way to an equally prodigious, yet more obsessive and metronomic form of movement, as he paced out his daily regimen. After 1799, when the Wordsworths had settled in Grasmere in the Lake District, famously he used to compose much of his work while striding up and down the straight gravel path in his garden. Along this small strip Wordsworth performed his pedestrian labours, the acts of walking and composition having finally become synonymous and indistinguishable.
Wordsworth went on walking for the rest of his long life and it was walking that sustained him. Friends came and departed as the radical politics of his youth gave way to the conservatism of old age; his reputation peaked only to suffer a prolonged decline. Yet throughout these fluctuations in fortune, he continued his astonishing pedestrian odyssey. Walking had become his natural state, the mode of being on foot the one which, above all others, allowed him (and those alongside him) to experience the natural world with an intensity alien to his predecessors.
As a pedestrian pure and simple Wordsworth could have held his own in an age of pedestrianism. He thought nothing of walking long distances in the ordinary course of his day-to-day affairs: seven miles out and seven miles back to fetch the post, fifteen miles across the mountains to have tea with a friend. Moreover he could walk for a long time at a great speed (as could his sister Dorothy in her youth). On one occasion in 1799 the two of them walked ten miles over a high mountain road, with a strong wind behind them, in 2.5 hours ‘by the watch,’ and then, after a rest of quarter of an hour in an inn, seven miles more in 1 hour 35 minutes – in all, seventeen miles in just over 4 hours: good going for a man, and remarkable for a woman at that time.15
While William Wordsworth’s prodigious feats of pedestrianism have been the subject of endless commentary, those of his sister Dorothy have, like almost every aspect of her life, remained largely overshadowed. This does her a great disservice, for in fact she holds a pioneering position within the walking canon, not only for her startling achievements as a walker in her own right, but also as a result of her journals, in which she reveals the true extent to which the act of walking was to dominate the lives of herself and her brother.
Having drawn attention to the shortcomings of William’s physique, De Quincey was to extend the same treatment to his sister, noting that Dorothy had a stooping attitude when walking, which he describes as ungraceful, lending ‘an unsexual character to her appearance when out of doors.’16 Yet if her gait was an unorthodox one it was also highly effective, for Dorothy was soon to display every sign of sharing her brother’s congenital aptitude for walking, along with, it should be added, a character robust enough to ignore the criticisms of both her wider family and society at large, to whom her walking habits would not simply have been regarded as eccentric but disreputable.17
Dorothy Wordsworth would have developed the habit of walking during a childhood spent with her brother William, but her career as a long-distance walker can be dated from 1794 while staying on a farm belonging to William Calvert near Keswick in the Lake District. On her way there, as she was later to describe, she and her brother walked from Kendal to Grasmere, a distance of eighteen miles, and then from Grasmere to Keswick, another fifteen miles. As Morris Marples correctly observes, ‘Not many women now would lightly walk thirty-three miles in a day.’18
Her first major ‘walking-tour’, and quite possibly the first such tour ever conducted by a woman, was taken alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge as they travelled from Alfoxden to Lynmouth and back in November 1797.19 This was the famous journey that was to provide Coleridge with the inspiration to write ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’, which was to appear as part of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), published the following year. Yet 1798 was also to produce another, much less celebrated work, this time not written for publication or for a wider audience, but one which illuminates this extraordinary period as Wordsworth, his sister and Coleridge walk their way into literary history.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal (1798) refers to the period between July 1797 and June 1798 when the Wordsworths rented ‘Alfoxden’, a large house three miles from Coleridge’s cottage at Nether Stowey in Somerset. The journal covers only the four months from late January 1798 and contains both very little action and almost no authorial presence whatsoever. With its abrupt, pared down prose style in which brief descriptions of the landscape sit alongside daily walking routines, it has been described as reading like a ‘pedestrian’s log-book.’20 Yet, this short and scantily written journal reveals both a fascination with the natural world as well as emphasising the bond between these three figures, who often appear to be in a state of perpetual motion.
From the opening entry, dated 20 January 1798, the author appears entranced by her environment, describing a garden ‘gay with flowers’ and the countryside bathed in sunbeams.21 This reverie is gradually displaced, however, as the garden is left behind and she heads off on foot. Soon each entry is introduced with the same word: ‘walked’; times and routes are given, as are observations of the weather, the sky and the landscape. The entries become shorter and more brisk as if the pace of the journal is itself replicating the walks it describes. At first alone, or with William, soon Coleridge is present too, and as the landscape changes with the season all extraneous information is cut back or omitted altogether, until only that which is essential remains:
[March] 25th. Walked to Coleridge’s after tea. Arrived at home at one o’clock. The night cloudy but not dark.
26th. Went to meet Wedgewood at Coleridge’s after dinner. Reached home at half-past twelve, a fine moonlight night; half moon.
29th. Coleridge dined with us.
30th. Walked I know not where.
31st. Walked.22
This entry for the 31st, ‘Walked’, somehow seems a distillation of the entire journal, as if its principal activity is finally laid bare. We don’t know where she walked, or why, and yet this seems unimportant; for the activity has finally gained a significance in and for itself, wholly divorced from its route or participants. And so it goes on, as the remaining days are passed in a welcome repetition of place and movement:
April 1st. Walked by moonlight.
2nd. A very high wind. Coleridge came to avoid the smoke; stayed all night. We walked in the wood, and sat under the trees […]
3rd. Walked to Crookham, with Coleridge and William […]
4th. Walked to the sea-side in the afternoon […]23
The journal reaches a rather abrupt conclusion with its final entry, ‘April 22nd [17th] Thursday. Walked to Cheddar. Slept at Cross.’24 Once again, the day has been pared back to reveal its constituent parts – walking and sleeping – and the remainder is left unspoken.
The Alfoxden Journal has received little of the attention devoted towards Dorothy Wordsworth’s much more substantial Grasmere Journal (1800–03) and from a purely literary point of view this is unsurprising. For the Alfoxden Journal shares none of the human interest, the exploration of character, and details of domestic daily life which characterise the Grasmere Journal, to which it is customarily seen as little more than an overture. Yet as far as the literature of walking is concerned, the Alfoxden Journal holds a much more significant position, for despite its brevity and almost skeletal form, or perhaps because of these, there is no other text which so clearly foregrounds the act of walking, or which affords this activity such a pre-eminent position within the process of literary composition.
If, then, 1798 is notable both for the publication of the Lyrical Ballads and for the events recorded in the Alfoxden Journal, it gains further significance from being the year in which Coleridge and Wordsworth were first introduced to William Hazlitt. Coleridge’s own claims as a walker have been well documented, not least through his association with Wordsworth, and if De Quincey’s description of Wordsworth’s physique appears uncharitable, it is as nothing compared to Carlyle’s description of Coleridge as ‘a fat, flabby, incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed […] He never straightens his knee-joints. He stoops with his fat, ill-shapen shoulders, and in walking does not tread, but shovel and slide.’25 As a young man Coleridge could match Wordsworth, step for step, and yet by the age of thirty, ill-health and depression had brought his walking career to a premature end. And while he often composed as he walked, his poetry does not express the overriding physical need for this activity to be found in Wordsworth’s verse.
Hazlitt first met Coleridge during the course of a walk, escorting him on the first six miles of his journey home from Wem in Shropshire, where Hazlitt’s father was a Unitarian Minister and where Coleridge had been preaching.26 This encounter resulted in an invitation for Hazlitt to visit Coleridge at his home in Nether Stowey, a journey of some 150 miles. Hazlitt completed this journey on foot and during the three weeks he was to spend with Coleridge he shared a pedestrian tour of the area with Coleridge and a local admirer named John Chester. Hazlitt evidently shared Coleridge’s capacity for long-distance walking, the two covering more than thirty miles together on the day of Hazlitt’s departure, but the 20-year old remained awe-struck in Coleridge’s company and ‘scarcely ever spoke himself, and never expressed an opinion.’27 Hazlitt never made a direct record of these first steps in his walking career and his recollections of the itinerary can be unreliable, and yet it is he, and not his more celebrated Romantic contemporaries, who has bequeathed to us the most acclaimed distillation of the walker’s philosophy:
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone […] I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticizing hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I like more elbow-room, and fewer incumbrances […] The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others […] Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner […] I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.28
First published in the journal, Table Talk, in 1821, ‘On Going a Journey’ was the first essay to directly address the idea of walking as an activity in its own right, and despite the many successors and imitators which were to follow, amongst them Robert Louis Stevenson and Leslie Stephen, Hazlitt’s essay remains the pre-eminent example of the genre. ‘On Going a Journey’ presents an idealized vision of both the walk and the walker, and sets out in prescriptive fashion the rules by which such an activity should be undertaken. The walk, as Hazlitt understands it, is purely a rural affair, a means of escaping the confines of the city to experience the unfettered freedom of the natural world, an experience to be enjoyed alone: ‘I like to be either entirely to myself,’ writes Hazlitt, ‘or entirely at the disposal of others; to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable or solitary.’29 However, later in the essay, he makes two exceptions to this rule: the first applies when travelling abroad, where, he informs us, a companion is a necessity – ‘I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own language.’30; the second concerns those walks which seek out specific locations – he gives the examples of ‘ruins, aqueducts, pictures’; and in these instances a ‘party of pleasure’ is acceptable, for it seems that it is only when walking aimlessly that solitude becomes a prerequisite.
Hazlitt’s essay is written in exactly the meandering, digressive style that he recommends for the walk itself, and it is adorned with numerous literary quotations from Shakespeare to Wordsworth.31 In fact, so noble and elevated an activity does the act of walking seem to become, that it begins to resemble not so much an opportunity to experience nature as an attempt to replicate art. In practice, however, such an idealized and romantic formula seems difficult to follow, and despite his protestations to the contrary, it appears that Hazlitt himself was not averse to walking in company and generally tended to walk with a companion.32 Hazlitt’s essay, while outwardly upbeat, displays an ambiguity towards the countryside in which his apparent and oft-stated reverence for solitude remains unconvincing; for in retaining the viewpoint of the committed city-dweller, his ardent observations of rural purity are offset by the impression that he longs to return home to write up his notes.
Rebecca Solnit has been critical of the entire genre of the walking essay, arguing that rather than emphasising the freedom that walking represents, the essay tends to reduce the activity to little more than a display of pious sentiment, removing exactly that element which lends the walk its greatest appeal – the unexpected: ‘The walking essay and the kind of walking described in it have much in common […] both walk and essay are meant to be pleasant, even charming, and so no one ever gets lost and lives on grubs and rainwater in a trackless forest, has sex in a graveyard with a stranger, stumbles into a battle, or sees visions of another world. The walking tour was much associated with parsons and other Protestant clergymen, and the walking essay has something of their primness.’33 To be fair to Hazlitt, however, the kinds of mishap that Solnit envisages were never likely to waylay the would-be walker in early nineteenth-century England, and between her depiction and his there remains sufficient leeway to encompass the entire literature of the subject.
Just as improvements in transportation and infrastructure facilitated the rise of the pedestrian in the late eighteenth century, so too did such changes see the act of walking ultimately superseded. In America, the development of the railroad swiftly eroded the supremacy of walking as the common mode of travel; and walking was soon relegated to the domestic sphere, a means of locomotion chiefly associated with women, the poor and infirm, and those who chose to wilfully reject the speed and clamour of metropolitan life. One such figure, who chose the pedestrian life in protest against the encroachments of the city and the erosion of the natural world, was Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862).
Thoreau, the quintessential American Romantic and greatest of all American walkers, is a figure whose transcendent, even mystical, appreciation of the natural world, makes him both a direct descendant of Wordsworth and Coleridge and, as we shall see, the progenitor of later walkers and naturalists, such as John Muir.
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.34
It is with these lines that Thoreau began his essay ‘Walking’, first published in the Atlantic Monthly of 1862 and originally called ‘Walking and the Wild’; and it was here that Thoreau, naturalist, poet, and social critic, outlined his belief that the act of walking was an expression both of freedom and wildness, and as such stood in opposition to the expansion of urban society. In Thoreau’s case, this threat came from the city of Boston, some eighteen miles from his home at Concord in Massachusetts, and it was here, through the preceding decades that he walked, endlessly crisscrossing Walden Woods and circumambulating Walden Pond. As a young man, Thoreau had walked from Concord to Boston and home again in a single evening in order to hear a lecture given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it was Emerson’s message of solitude and self-reliance which was to inform Thoreau’s own philosophy.35 Emerson was a Transcendentalist – he believed that behind the empirical world of our everyday observation lay the world of the spiritual, a realm that could be accessed through living in harmony with the natural world. Thoreau was to transplant exactly this sense of mystical otherworldliness to his own surroundings, transforming his daily walks through the local countryside – an area which, far from being a virgin wilderness, had been settled for two hundred years – into a journey into the unknown:
Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the Kings of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.36
Between July 1845 and September 1847 Thoreau was to put Emerson’s philosophy into practice, living in a cabin at Walden Pond (on Emerson’s property) and turning his back on modern society. The result was Walden, or, Life in the Woods, first published in 1854 and still regarded by many as one of the sacred texts of the Preservationist movement. Both here and in his essay, ‘Walking’, Thoreau was to espouse the idea of the reborn man, forged anew in the midst of a primordial America which could still be found beyond the margins of urban society. Such a man would be self-sufficient and solitary, pioneer and visionary; a representative of that rare order of men, the Walker:
My companion and I […] take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order – not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honourable class […] He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People […] It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit.37
Such men are, of course, a rare breed, and Thoreau acknowledges at the beginning of his essay only to have met ‘but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.’38 Emerson himself described Thoreau as a man who ‘could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on the mountains and in the woods.’39 For, like Hazlitt and his Romantic contemporaries, Thoreau saw the act of walking both as a means of escaping urban society and as an opportunity for solitude. Furthermore, just as Hazlitt’s meandering essay replicates the act of walking it describes, so too does Thoreau avoid a straightforward narrative in favour of a series of circuitous paths around his subject, as if his essay were a reflection of his repeated encirclement of Walden Pond. Indeed, Thoreau has been described as having ‘thought with his feet’ in as far as the act of walking came to determine the form of all his books, which were structured not by logical argument but rather by the succession of observations that were presented to him while on foot.40 Where Thoreau’s attitude to walking differs from that of Hazlitt and his Romantic forbears, however, is in the degree to which he values the wild and the freedom it represents. For as an American in the early nineteenth century, Thoreau had direct access to a frontier which had long since been closed off to his European counterparts, an uncharted space into which a man, if he so chose, could walk and never return:
It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return – prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.41
In his awareness of the wilderness at his door and the possibility it afforded of a return to a primordial existence, whether real or imagined, Thoreau was consciously placing himself not within a tradition of contemporary walks and walkers, but within a much older lineage: ‘I walk out into a Nature’, he wrote, ‘such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in.’42
For Thoreau, the New World represented both the future and the growth of a new nation, but also a return to a past free from the taint of urban civilisation. ‘Walking’ is an essay that is, of course, about much more than its title suggests, and having identified the role that walking plays in his own life and the attributes that the walker requires, Thoreau’s essay reaches a crossroads, the point at which the walker is faced with a choice: East or West? For Thoreau, the direction is clear:
Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly towards the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me […] I must walk towards Oregon, and not towards Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west […] We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.43
‘Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through’44 writes Thoreau, in direct contradiction of Wordsworth’s daily routine; and Thoreau’s essay, with its frontier spirit and visions of an untamed continent, can, by contrast, make its English counterparts appear quaintly domesticated and somewhat diminished in scope and ambition. Yet just as Thoreau was to celebrate the wild and the walker’s place within it, so too was he writing against the inexorable encroachments at its borders; and while his essay represents the pinnacle of a literature which emphasises wildness and freedom, he appears also to foreshadow its end.45 For a generation after his death in 1862, the frontier that he had eulogised was finally closed; the expansion of the railroad and the urban society that grew in its wake had finally eclipsed his vision of the wild, and the activity of walking was displaced successively by other forms of transportation. Yet while the landscapes he described were soon to be transformed, the spirit which animates his essay was to remain hugely influential. Indeed, within five years of his death, a figure whom Thoreau would no doubt have recognised as sharing, if not surpassing, his own genius for walking, was to embark upon his own epic journey into the wilderness.
Born in Scotland in 1838, John Muir and his family emigrated to the United States in 1849 where they started a farm near Portage, Wisconsin. A deeply religious man, Muir was also a keen, not to say obsessive, botanist and it is these twin passions for God and nature which inform his writing. Like Emerson and Thoreau before him, Muir was inspired by the pedestrian ordeals and botanical zeal of Alexander von Humboldt, who during a five-year (1799–1804) expedition through Central and South America had covered more than 6,000 miles, largely on foot, in search of new specimens.46 Having recovered from a serious injury that almost cost him his sight, Muir finally decided to embark upon his long-held dream and follow in von Humboldt’s footsteps, leaving Indianapolis in 1867 and heading south:
I had long been looking from the wild woods and gardens of the Northern States to those of the warm South, and at last, all drawbacks overcome, I set forth [from Indianapolis] on the first day of September, 1867, joyful and free, on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico […] My plan was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest. Folding my map, I shouldered my little bag and plant press and strode away among the old Kentucky oaks, rejoicing in splendid visions of pines and palms and tropic flowers in glorious array, not, however, without a few cold shadows of loneliness, although the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome.47
Described as the ‘first significant account of a long-distance walk for the sake of walking’, Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1914) was based upon the journal he kept throughout his epic walk, although it remained unpublished until Muir’s death in 1914.48 By this time Muir had gone on to become America’s most celebrated naturalist; the author of a dozen books and a founder member of the Sierra Club; a renowned conservationist whose efforts had led to the formation of both Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. In 1867, however, all this was to come as Muir, aged 29, set off on foot through Indiana and Kentucky, averaging some 25 miles a day as he walked on towards the Florida Keys. Walking through the Southern States, ‘an open wound still festering from the Civil War’, Muir has little to say about the aftermath of those events. Indeed he has little to say about anything except the wildlife he encounters. Avoiding towns and cities in favour of the mountains, forests and swampland of the American South, Muir’s journal is in fact a surprisingly uneventful document in which we learn nothing of his attitude towards walking itself.49 In part, Muir’s journal can be read as an evangelical and more lushly descriptive, American counterpart to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal, in which short episodic entries dwell on distances covered and wildlife observed: ‘September 4 – Walked ten miles of forest. Met a strange oak with willow looking leaves […] September 30 – Traveled to-day more than forty miles without dinner or supper […] October 4 – New plants constantly appearing. All day in dense, wet, dark, mysterious forest of flat-topped taxodiums.’50 But where the Alfoxden Journal remains sparse and restrained, Muir’s prose is more frequently excited and overblown, as he struggles to relate, with biblical phraseology, the sheer exoticism of the landscapes he encounters:
I am now in the hot gardens of the sun, where the palm meets the vine, longed and prayed for and often visited in dreams, and, though lonely to-night amidst this multitude of strangers, strange plants, strange winds blowing gently, whispering, cooing, in a language I have never learned, and strange birds also, everything solid or spiritual full of influences that I never before felt, yet I thank the Lord with all my heart for his goodness in granting me admission to this magnificent realm.51
For Muir, one senses that the writing is always subordinate to the walking, which is itself simply a means to the botanical end he has set himself.52 But although he lacks the style of Emerson and Thoreau, Muir achieves a degree of absolute identification with the natural world that is unparalleled in the literature of walking; for this is total immersion in one’s surroundings to the point at which all extraneous material – society, politics, history – is stripped away to reveal the ecology that lies beneath.
Muir was not destined to reach South America on this occasion (he wasn’t to make the journey until 1911), and considering that he was planning to float down the length of the Amazon on a raft, this was, as he later acknowledged, probably for the best.53 Like von Humboldt before him, however, he did reach Cuba, but still weakened by the long period of illness he had suffered on reaching Florida, he changed course, eventually reaching California, the state with which he was to become most famously associated. Muir was to continue walking throughout his life, but it was his walk to the Gulf coast that remains his iconic journey. For in expressing his belief that it is the natural world which is man’s true home, an environment superior to anything which human civilisation has to offer, he not only continued the work of Wordsworth and Thoreau, but also did much to inspire the preservation of our own wild places. In this way Muir’s work has continued to influence contemporary walkers and writers of the natural world, such as Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane. Indeed, it is in the following observation, repeated as an epigraph to Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2007), that Muir provides us with both the perfect encapsulation of his philosophy and the expression of a sentiment which is shared, no doubt, by the generations of walkers who have followed in his footsteps: ‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.’54
1 Thoreau, ‘Walking’, in The Pleasures of Walking, ed. by Edwin Valentine Mitchell, 129–172 , p. 135
2 John Urry, Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, p. 77
3 William Knight, ed., Letters of the Wordsworth Family: From 1787 to 1855; Vol. 1, London: Ginn & Company, 1907, p. 31
4 Landry, The Invention of the Countryside, p. 213
5 Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lake Poets, ed. by David Wright, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 135. It should be remembered that, at the time of De Quincey’s estimate, Wordsworth was only 65 and had still another fifteen years of walking ahead of him.
6 William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’ in The Major Works, ed. by Stephen Charles Gill, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, Book II, Lines 313–323, pp. 383 & 400
7 Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, Book XIII, Lines 463–465, p. 498
8 Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, Book XII, Lines 145–152, p. 572. In these lines Wordsworth is expressing a sentiment which was later to be echoed both by Whitman (‘Song of the Open Road’) and Stevenson (‘Roads’). It was to find its most emphatic confirmation, however, in the poetry of Edward Thomas (1878–1917), who writes: ‘I love roads:/The goddesses that dwell/Far along invisible/Are my favourite gods.’ See Edward Thomas, ‘Roads’ in Collected Poems, London: Faber, 1979, p. 163
9 Marples, p. 34
10 Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, Book VI, Lines 426–434, p. 461
11 Letter to Dorothy Wordsworth, September 1790, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, p. 35
12 Robinson, p. 25
13 Solnit, p. 112
14 Wordsworth, ‘When First I Journeyed Hither’ in The Major Works, Book VI, Lines 36–39, p. 221
15 Marples, p. 37
16 De Quincey, Recollections of the Lake Poets, p. 132
17 It was in response to such criticisms of his sister’s conduct that Wordsworth was to write his poem, ‘To a Young Lady, Who Had Been Reproached for Taking Long Walks in the Country’ (1802). See The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994, pp. 256–7
18 Marples, p. 90
19 Marples, p. 91
20 Marples, p. 89. The brevity of the prose style may owe less to Dorothy Wordsworth than to the Journal’s first editor, William Knight, who was responsible for omitting what he judged to be ‘trivial detail’. Unfortunately for the modern reader, any such omissions can no longer be checked against the original MS, for as Pamela Woof notes in her introduction to The Alfoxden Journal, ‘The teasing problem with the Alfoxden Journal is that there is no manuscript. Between Professor William Knight’s readings of it in 1889, 1897, and possibly 1913, it has not been seen. We have to accept a reduced and somewhat unreliable text. See Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. by Pamela Woof, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, Introduction, p. xxviii
21 Dorothy Wordsworth, p. 141
22 Dorothy Wordsworth, p. 150
23 Dorothy Wordsworth, p. 151
24 Dorothy Wordsworth, p. 153
25 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Letter to John A Carlyle’ (24 June 1824), qtd. in Gary Dexter, ed., Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola, London: Frances Lincoln, 2009, p. 64
26 Marples, p. 47
27 Marples, p. 48
28 William Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’, in Selected Essays, ed. by George Sampson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917, 141–150, pp. 141–2
29 Hazlitt, p. 142
30 Hazlitt, p. 145
31 As Anne D. Wallace has observed: ‘Hazlitt’s narrative, indeed, wanders, rambling from point to point along a line with little apparent attempt at unifying commentary or intentional shaping. It comes as something of a shock when he speaks of ‘returning’ to his main enquiry, for the unwary reader has been led down a bypath step by step.’ Wallace, p. 178
32 Marples, p. 53
33 Solnit, p. 120
34 Thoreau, p. 129
35 Amato, p. 142
36 Thoreau, pp. 135–6
37 Thoreau, pp. 130–1
38 Thoreau, p. 129
39 Amato, p. 142
40 Amato, p. 143
41 Thoreau, p. 130
42 Thoreau, p. 138
43 Thoreau, pp. 142–3
44 Thoreau, p. 153
45 Joseph A. Amato writes: ‘Thoreau’s life appears to stand at the end of American country walking. He witnessed walking – this first and principal way of American native and colonial locomotion – being displaced by horse, steamboat, train, and telegraph. Romantic walker, Thoreau circumambulated in ever tightening circles – like an archaic peasant around a church steeple – as vast systems of transportation, communication, commerce, and national power circumscribed the globe.’ Amato, p. 151
46 ‘Humboldt did his science on foot’, writes Amato, ‘Humboldt shaped the passionate intellect that directed the ever faithful foot toward nature on a pedestrian journey that took alternate steps between romantic awe and scientific knowledge.’ Amato, p. 116
47 John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, New York: Mariner Books, 1998, pp. 1–2
48 Solnit, p. 126. Miles Jebb, author of Walkers, has questioned Muir’s choice of title, claiming that ‘the name given to his walk is misleading: it was around 800 miles and done in two sections with a sea passage in between’. In his description of Muir himself, however, Jebb’s tone is more reverential: ‘As Abraham Lincoln was to the political world, so was John Muir to the natural world: a stern, dedicated, self-taught, ‘log-cabined’, middle-western prophet. Just as we owe the Union to Lincoln, to Muir we owe the national parks: as Lincoln was not afraid to be in the firing line, Muir led from the front in his discoveries of the wonders of Yosemite and his pedestrian penetration into the wilderness.’ Jebb, p. 122
49 Rebecca Solnit writes: ‘An acute and often ecstatic observer of the natural world around him, he says nothing at all about why he is walking in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, though it seems clear enough that it is because he is hardy, poor, and possessed of botanical passions best fulfilled on foot. But though he is one of history’s great walkers, walking itself is seldom his subject. There is no well-defined border between the literature of walking and nature writing, but nature writers tend to make the walking implicit at best, a means for the encounters with nature which they describe, but seldom as a subject.’ Solnit, p. 127
50 Muir, pp. 6, 55 & 63
51 Muir, p. 93
52 Muir often expressed how little enjoyment he gained from the writing process, complaining that, ‘This business of writing books is a long, tiresome, endless job.’ Sally M. Miller & Daryl Morrison, John Muir: Family, Friends and Adventure, University of New Mexico Press, 2005, pp. 87–8
53 Muir, p. 169
54 John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (1938), ed. by LM Wolfe, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, p. 439, and qtd. in Robert MacFarlane, The Wild Places, London: Granta, 2007, epigraph