Va”grant, n. One who strolls from place to place; one who has no settled habitation; an idle wanderer; a sturdy beggar; an incorrigible rogue; a vagabond.1
There are some men born with a vagrant strain in the blood, an insatiable inquisitiveness about the world beyond their doors. Arthur Rickett2
According to the Vagrancy Act of 1824, ‘every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of subsistence and not giving a good account of himself or herself […] shall be deemed a rogue and vagabond.’3 Punishable by a period of three months imprisonment, the act remains in force, albeit in an extensively amended form. In fact ever since the Peasants Revolt of 1381, and the subsequent statute of 1383, foot travellers, both urban and rural, who have been unable to provide evidence of their means of support, have been liable to arrest and imprisonment.4
In an article entitled ‘Radical walking’, Donna Landry writes: ‘The ambiguity of walking can be traced to its association with vagrancy, the quintessential social crime in late sixteenth century Britain.’ During this period, the unfortunate vagrant found himself trapped in a kind of legal Catch 22, having committed no crime except that of being a vagrant; it was not his actions that were found to be at fault but his very status, which was now that of the criminal. ‘A similar suspicion attached to rural foot travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, continues Landry, ‘Enclosure and privatisation of common lands enlarged the possibility of trespass. Why perambulate the woods and fields without intent?’5
After the introduction of the Game Laws of 1671, the would-be wanderer would now have to contend with the suspicion of poaching too, effectively maintaining the landless individual within the confines of their immediate place of work, employment being the only measure of legitimacy for their movement. Hemmed in by the law, the act of walking inevitably acquired a political connotation, challenging those boundaries imposed by society, and increasingly aligned with ‘a rebellious reclaiming of common rights, with the dream of liberal freedom, with the ideal of democracy.’6 Thus the figure of the vagrant has developed a powerful symbolic charge, suggesting the existence of an individual at odds with our familiar sense of place, and questioning the enforced distinction between public and private space. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the vagrant has come to represent Romantic notions of freedom, both politically and aesthetically; an idea best articulated by the poet who gives voice to ‘the strange half-absence of wandering and murmuring vagrancy.’7
The figure in whom these themes first coalesce, and in whose writing we find a powerful voice of protest against enclosure allied to a vagrant spirit, is the labouring poet John Clare. Born in 1793 in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston, Clare developed an extraordinary, even visionary, sense of place in which his very identity became grounded within the rural landscapes of his youth. Both enchanted by his immediate environment and drawn to explore beyond the horizon of his known world, Clare was later to recall his first attempt to transcend this boyhood perimeter when, at the age of five, he set off across neighbouring Emmonsales Heath:
I had imagind that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison and that a days journey was able to find it […] so I went on […] expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I coud […] see into its secrets the same as I coud […] see heaven by looking into the water so I eagerly wandered on and rambled along the furze […] when I got home I found my parents in great distress and half the village about hunting me.8
It is exactly this sense of enchantment that was to characterise many of Clare’s early poems of Helpston life, but these images of pastoral innocence were to be tempered by a growing awareness of the ways in which this landscape was being destroyed, as between 1809 and 1820 the old open-field parishes, such as Helpston, were subjected to Parliamentary enclosure. Much has been written about the effects of enclosure on the rural landscape, and in particular the emphatic role that these events played in Clare’s life and work.9 It is beyond the scope of this book to explore them in any detail here, but the consequences, at least as far as Clare would have experienced them, are clear:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky […]
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labours rights and left the poor a slave
And memorys pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now […]
These paths are stopt – the rude philistines thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
On paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
This with the poor scared freedom bade good bye
And much the[y] feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless laws enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes
Have found too truly that they were but dreams10
The sentiments expressed in The Mores are characteristic of many of the Helpston poems (c. 1812–1831) in which the walker finds himself increasingly hemmed in and redirected, his activities questioned and curtailed. This loss of pedestrian freedom is experienced by Clare as symptomatic of the slavery engendered by enclosure, for as the physical landscape was mapped and rights of ownership were apportioned, so Clare and his fellow foot-travellers would have found themselves increasingly liable to the charge of trespass:
I dreaded walking where there was no path
And pressed with cautious tread the meadow swath
And always turned to look with wary eye
And always feared the owner coming by;
Yet everything about where I had gone
Appeared so beautiful I ventured on
And when I gained the road where all are free
I fancied every stranger frowned at me
And every kinder look appeared to say
“You’ve been on trespass in your walk today.”11
Clare belonged to a rural class to whom the act of walking was both an instrumental part of daily life as well as a means of ensuring social cohesion; but it was also an activity which Clare valued precisely because it signified a freedom from labour. For what distinguished Clare from his fellow Romantics, and Wordsworth in particular, is that, despite their shared reverence for the natural world and their acute awareness of the freedoms it engendered, Clare was also conscious of the fact that the land provided him and his contemporaries with their means of support. From an early age Clare was employed variously in ploughing, reaping, threshing, gardening, and herding cattle, activities to which he returned despite the success of his first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820). Thus, the walking necessitated by his everyday work was sharply distinguished from those more restful and contemplative ‘careless rambles’ and ‘stray walks’ which occupied his days of leisure: ‘A six days prisoner lifes support to earn/ From dusty cobwebs and the murky barn/ The weary thresher meets the rest thats given/ And thankfull sooths him in the boon of heaven/ And Sabbath walks enjoys along the fields’.12
If, then, walking purely for leisure was an activity viewed increasingly with suspicion, and regarded as a likely precursor to trespass or poaching, it was in Clare’s case compounded by his poetic preoccupations.13 For the success of Clare’s early poems placed him in an increasingly precarious position, in which he found himself neither wholly accepted by the literary establishment in London, nor able to maintain his former relationship within his agricultural community. Finding himself increasingly isolated and distanced from his locality, Clare’s poetic career developed in tandem with his own mental disorientation, a process which led inexorably towards the asylum. He was admitted to Dr Mathew Allen’s private asylum at High Beach in Epping in 1837 where his ‘lifelong solidarity with gypsies and other vagrants’ deepened.14 And it was here, almost four years later, on 20 July 1841, that John Clare escaped to embark upon one of the most celebrated of all English journeys. Both personally, and as a poet, 1841 was the most tumultuous year of his life; it was also his most productive period, a year in which he wrote more than 3,000 lines of verse. However, as far as his contribution to the literature of walking is concerned, it is his short prose account, The Journey out of Essex (1841) that remains his most significant work.15
Spanning more than ninety miles and taking some three and a half days to complete, Clare’s walk home from High Beach to Northborough in Northamptonshire is, from the outset, a hallucinatory account of dislocation and despair. Having first been offered assistance in planning his escape by local gypsies, Clare sets out alone and in the wrong direction. Once redirected, however, and he is soon on the Great York Road, spending his first night sleeping in a shed outside Stevenage: ‘I lay down with my head towards the north’, writes Clare, ‘to show myself the steering point in the morning.’16 But the next day, as he progresses on through Bedfordshire, Clare’s condition rapidly deteriorates. Crippled by gravel in his shoes, one of which has almost lost a sole, Clare has still not eaten, is unable to find a place to sleep, and is growing increasingly disorientated:
I then suddenly forgot which was North or South and though I narrowly examined both ways I could see no tree or bush or stone heap that I could reccolect I had passed so I went on mile after mile almost convinced I was going the same way I came and these thoug[h]ts were so strong upon me that doubt and hopelessness made me turn so feeble that I was scarcely able to walk yet I could not sit down or give up but shuffled along till I saw a lamp shining as bright as the moon.17
Having found a porch to sleep on, Clare continues on the following morning, accompanied some of the way by another gypsy he encounters on the road, a young woman who cautions him on his appearance, warning him that he’ll be noticed. Yet visible or not, Clare is now oblivious to his surroundings, his mind dissociated from the legs that are carrying him homeward:
I have but a slight reccolection of my journey between here and Stilton for I was knocked up and noticed little or nothing – one night I lay in a dyke bottom from the wind and went sleep half an hour when I suddenly awoke and found one side wet through from the sock in the dyke bottom so I got out and went on […] I then entered a town […] I felt so weak here that I forced to sit down on the ground to rest myself and while I sat here a Coach that seemed to be heavy laden came rattling up and stopt in the hollow below me and I cannot reccolect its ever passing by me I then got up and pushed onward seeing little to notice for the road very often looked as stupid as myself and I was very often half asleep as I went.18
On the third day, Clare satisfied his hunger by eating the grass by the roadside, ‘which seemed to taste something like bread I was hungry and eat heartily till I was satisfied and in fact the meal seemed to do me good.’19 By the time he reached Stilton, however, he was ‘compleatly foot foundered and broken down.’20 Shortly before Peterborough he is passed by a cart carrying neighbours from Helpston, who, witnessing his condition, club together and throw him fivepence with which he buys some bread and cheese. By now only the shame of sitting down in the street is keeping him going, but on reaching Werrington, he meets a cart carrying a woman who urges him to get in: ‘I refused and thought her either drunk or mad but when I was told it was my second wife Patty I got in and was soon in Northborough.’21 Clare was soon home, where he was to discover that things were not quite as they appeared; for Patty was not his second wife but his first, and his journey had been in vain. Harbouring the fantasy that he was returning home to his first ‘wife’ Mary (in fact never his wife but the first love of his Helpston childhood), Clare was unaware that she had in fact died several years before, and on being confronted with the news he simply refused to believe it. It was Mary who had been his silent companion on his long walk home, the subject of his dreams and the object of his escape from High Beach. The final entry in the Journey out of Essex, dated 24 July 1841, reads: ‘Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary – her and her family are as nothing to me now though she herself was once the dearest of all – and how can I forget.’22 Quite what Clare’s newly demoted ‘second’ wife made of this is not recorded; but as soon as he reached home, Clare began the task of transcribing the notes he had made during his journey, after which he added the following letter to his wife (‘Mary Clare’, not Patty):
My dear wife
I have written an account of my journey or rather escape from Essex for your amusement and hope it may divert your leisure hours – I would have told you before now that I got here to Northborough last Friday night but not being able to see you or hear where you was I soon began to feel homeless at home and shall bye and bye feel nearly hopeless but not so lonely as I did in Essex […] my home is no home to me my hopes are not entirely hopeless while even the memory of Mary lives so near me.23
‘Homeless at home’ is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the vagrant spirit which animated Clare, and which propelled him on his compulsive homeward journey. In the prologue to his biography of Clare, Jonathan Bate retraces his journey home from Essex along the Great York Road, now the A1: ‘Driving its dual carriageway today’, writes Bate, ‘it is impossible to imagine a man walking this route, tired, confused, cold at night and hungry by day.’24 And yet in 2004 the writer and walker, Iain Sinclair, was to do exactly this, retracing Clare’s footsteps from High Beach and in the process revealing a startlingly altered landscape:
I set out from High Beach in Winter, logging the contour lines of lager cans, burger cartons, cigarette packets, bits of cars. Cargo-trash getting denser as I approached the roundabout where four roads meet […] An Enfield publican put Clare straight, pointing out the shortest way. The contemporary version is less certain of local topography. An instruction has gone out from the brewers enforcing a total embargo on courtesy. This was one of those ‘High Beach, John? If I wanted fuckin’ High Beach, I wouldn’t start from here’ scenarios. All we learn, from another lunchtime casual, one-eyed and three pints in, is: ‘There used to be a road. I think. Once.’25
Political questions of land ownership and rights of access give Clare’s walks an affinity with twentieth-century walkers; and perhaps it is this shared perception of a landscape threatened by erasure that helps to explain Iain Sinclair’s acknowledgement that Clare’s Journey out of Essex was ‘one of my obsessions’, a journey whose very existence acts as a ‘provocation for future walkers.’26 Sinclair describes Clare’s walk as a ‘revamped Pilgrim’s Progress’; a ‘frantic pilgrimage’; and a ‘shamanic voyage to a more persuasive reality.’27 In these remarks he echoes the words of an earlier walker and would-be vagrant, Stephen Graham, who wrote that ‘Tramping and vagabondage is a short cut to reality.’28 Certainly it seems clear that Clare’s journey was more than merely an attempt to distance himself from uncongenial surroundings; for he was discarding both an unwanted identity and an inhospitable present, in favour of a re-imagined past unencumbered by awkward realities. But, of course, Clare’s journey was unsuccessful, the longed-for object of his delusion long since dead, his sanity mislaid along the way. At first, his wife, Patty, believed him better, stating ‘that she wished to try him for a while’, but by December of 1841 Clare had once again been committed, this time to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum.29 He wrote some of his finest poetry there, but his days of vagrancy were now passed and he never left, dying at the age of 70 in 1864.
If the Vagrancy Act of 1824 can be identified as the historical moment in which the vagrant was accorded formal recognition in the UK, then an equivalent date in the US is 1873, the year of the economic crisis out of which the tramp was born. As Christine Photinos indicates in The Tramp in American Literature (1873–1939), the word ‘tramp’ had previously signified a journey taken on foot; but as a combination of railroad expansion and a series of economic crises from 1873 onwards resulted in the creation of a vast transient population of marginally employed men, so for the first time the tramp became a distinct social type.30 It was the sheer scale of this new social class that led the figure of the tramp in late nineteenth-century America to become a subject of both trepidation and fascination for the middle classes, and this was soon reflected in a series of books which sought to reveal the true lifestyle of these mysterious figures. In the opening line of his novel A Tight Squeeze (1879), the author, George A. Baker, was to ask, ‘What is a tramp?’; and both here and in novels such as Horatio Alger’s Tony, the Tramp (1876), Lee O Harris’s The Man who Tramps (1878) and, most influentially, Josiah Flynt’s Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (1899), this question was debated. Depicting the tramp as either a victim of economic misfortune or as a willing participant in an adventurous lifestyle, it was, unsurprisingly, the picaresque view of the vagrant that won the day, and which was celebrated in Flynt’s bestselling account. From this point on and despite dissenting voices, amongst them Jack London in his essay The Tramp (1903), the vagrant gradually attained a heroic, if not mythic, status as a figure who had seemingly rejected the strictures of the economic system in favour of a life of freedom; a figure later to be celebrated in the US by writers as diverse as Vachel Lindsay, Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos, as well as Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats.31
But in American literature, the romantic depiction of the vagrant has its own pioneering figure, the man who preached the gospel of the open road:
Afoot and light hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.32
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was America’s first significant urban poet. In his own words, ‘Walt Whitman, a Kosmos, of Manhattan the son’33, he bears the same relationship to the city of New York as does Baudelaire to Paris and Dickens to London, and like them he was to describe his city from street level and with a walker’s perspective. Born in Long Island, Whitman lived and worked in some obscurity as a teacher and journalist, before self-publishing Leaves of Grass in 1855. Carrying Whitman’s picture, but no name, and published in a first edition of only 795 copies, Leaves of Grass still managed to provoke one of the most celebrated responses in literary history, with Ralph Waldo Emerson praising it as ‘the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed’, adding, ‘I greet you at the beginning of a brilliant career.’34 In many ways, however, Leaves of Grass was to prove the beginning, middle and end of Whitman’s career, for he was in fact to spend his entire life revising, enlarging and re-publishing the book through numerous editions, the last of which, the so-called ‘Deathbed edition’, appearing shortly before his death in 1892. By this time the original twelve poems had grown to almost four hundred.
The recurrent motif of Whitman’s work is that of the open road, and in 1855 when Leaves of Grass first appeared, the road was still seen by most Americans as a symbol of opportunity. Indeed, as Paul Zweig has noted in his study of Whitman, at this point in America’s history, the symbol of the road was rapidly becoming a concrete reality, as new routes sprung up from New England through to Ohio and on to the gold fields of California: ‘The Yankee peddler, Johnny Appleseed, the Conestoga wagon, Horace Greeley’s “Go West, young man”, were on the road and defined the road.’35 If, then, the road was the symbol, the preferred mode of transportation was on foot, and throughout Whitman’s work, and especially in the most celebrated poems of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the act of walking is ever present. Sauntering up and down Broadway, moving aimlessly through the city streets and beyond, Whitman remains the laureate of the American wandering tradition:
Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
The whole universe indicates that it is good,
The past and the present indicate that it is good.36
I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.37
Of course, Whitman’s poems express more the spirit of vagrancy than the reality that such a lifestyle entails, and in his often highly sentimental evocation of a life of freedom on the open road he avoids altogether the depiction of suffering that Clare, for example, was to experience on his journey home from Essex. In this respect, Whitman belongs firmly within the Romantic tradition of walking literature that sees the vagrant, tramp or vagabond as a symbolic figure at odds with the orthodoxies of conventional society. This is an outlook which is mirrored, if not surpassed, in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) whose own fervent celebration of vagrancy reaches its apotheosis in his poem The Vagabond (1896):
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river –
There’s the life for a man like me,
There’s the life for ever.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o’er me;
Give the face of earth around,
And the road before me.
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.38
During Stevenson’s short but picaresque life, his walking was almost entirely confined to the period between 1874, the year of his recovery from a nervous breakdown, and his departure for California in 1879; and it was during this period that Stevenson’s two major contributions to the literature of walking emerged: his essay ‘Walking Tours’ (1876), and his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). In the latter, Stevenson once again paints a highly romanticised picture of life on the open road, including a description of his pioneering use of a home-made sleeping bag, a landmark not so much in the literature of vagrancy, but that of camping, in which Stevenson’s account must rank as the first.39 ‘For my part’, writes Stevenson, ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.’40 In this instance, however, Stephenson’s need for movement was hindered severely by the pace of his reluctant companion, the donkey, Modestine: ‘What that pace was, there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of the leg.’41
Stevenson formalises his philosophy of walking in ‘Walking Tours’(1876), itself a response to Hazlitt’s ‘On Going a Journey’ (1822), perhaps the best known essay in the entire walking canon, and it is here that Stevenson reaffirms Hazlitt’s contention that walking should be a solitary occupation: ‘A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you […] And surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is best.’42 For Stevenson, however, like Whitman before him, the act of walking is never precipitated out of economic necessity, but is instead a means of temporarily breaking away from the confines of everyday existence. Thus, despite their evangelism for the open road and the vagrant’s freedom, theirs is always a lifestyle and never quite the life itself. In short, having talked the talk, the question remains, did they really walk the walk? Perhaps by maintaining a twofold existence as writer and walker, the experiences on the road can never truly be more than episodes within the writer’s life. But what if the life of the writer was itself merely a precursor to a life on the road, a life in which the writer was superseded by the vagrant?
Born in 1854; begins writing poetry as a teenager; ‘retires’ from poetry before reaching 21; travels through Europe, Indonesia and Africa; dies aged 37 in 1891. If Stevenson can be said to have lived a short, intense and exotic life, he is surpassed in each of these categories by his almost exact contemporary, the poet and vagrant extraordinaire, Arthur Rimbaud. Born in what he was later to describe as ‘the most supremely idiotic of all little provincial towns’43, Charleville in the Ardennes, the life of Arthur Rimbaud has been characterised as an elliptical series of escapes or desertions, punctuated by periodic returns to his childhood home, until, finally, he broke away for good, never to return.44 Following a familiar template of adolescent development, Rimbaud’s early academic success was soon to give way to full-blown teenage rebellion. In 1870, aged fifteen, his first poems were published in magazines, and the following year, after several earlier truancies (one of which resulted in a brief period of imprisonment in Paris), he headed off once again. Returning to Paris, he ‘slept rough, ate out of dustbins, read pamphlets on the bookstalls’,45 before turning round again and, less than two weeks after arriving, walking home – a journey of some 150 miles:
On the roads, through winter nights, without a home, without habits, without bread, a voice strangled my frozen heart: “Weakness or strength. These are your options, so strength it is. We know neither where you’re going, nor why you’re going, entering anywhere, answering anyone. You’re no more likely to be killed than a corpse.” By morning, I had developed such a lost, dead expression that those I met may not have even seen me.46
Within months he was off again, returning to Paris on foot to play his part, or so it is claimed, in the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Whether or not he was actually involved in the uprising is unclear, but he was certainly affected by these early experiences of life on the road. For, as Charles Nicholl has noted, this period marks the first of many transformations in Rimbaud’s life, as the studious, introverted schoolboy became somebody else: ‘a dirty, long-haired, loutish young man who “scandalizes” the locals with his new “romantic hairstyle coming halfway down his back”, his workman’s brûle-gueule or clay pipe, his obscenity-filled harangues against Church and State.’47 Or as Jack Kerouac was later to intone in his paean to Rimbaud: ‘The Vagrant is born/the deranged seer makes his first Manifesto […] On foot Rimbaud walks.’48 Vagrant, vagabond, or, in Rimbaud’s parlance, voyant,49 the poet was to be both walker and visionary: ‘I tell you: the poet has to be a seer, to make himself a seer by a long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses.’50
In Rimbaud’s short life, 1871 was a turning point, for it was also the year in which he was to meet Paul Verlaine, the poet and lover with whom he was to continue both his derangement of the senses and his experience of the open road. In tandem with Verlaine, Rimbaud was to swap Paris for London, a chaotic period of ‘walks, binges, and studies.’51 The first of these preoccupations is captured in the poem ‘Workers’ in the Illuminations (1872–4), in which Rimbaud writes: ‘We took a walk in the suburbs. It was overcast and the South wind stirred rank smells of ravaged gardens and starched fields […] The city, its smoke and noise, pursued us down the roads.’52 It is difficult to overstate the importance of walking to Rimbaud and Verlaine at this time as they explored London’s outer perimeter, seeking to dispel the mysteries of the metropolis. In a letter to Émile Blémond, Verlaine was to write: ‘Every day we take enormous walks in the suburbs and in the country round London […] We’ve seen Kew, Woolwich, and many other places […] Drury Lane, Whitechapel, Pimlico, the City, Hyde Park: all these have no longer any mystery for us.’53
In ‘Vagabonds’, also from the Illuminations, Rimbaud writes, ‘We wandered, sustained by wine from cellars and the road’s dry bread’54; and it is interesting to compare his harshly unsentimental account of life on the road with Stevenson’s much more romantically inclined version. For while Whitman and Stevenson were to depict the walker as invariably well-fed and well-shod, as early as 1870 Rimbaud was describing, in his poem ‘My Bohemia’, his ‘wounded shoes’ and depicting a figure ‘with fists thrust in the torn pockets of a coat held together by no more than its name.’55
In the years following his departure from London (and from Verlaine also), Rimbaud’s travels become more erratic and consequently less well documented: Reading; Scarborough; Stuttgart; Milan; Marseilles; as the list of confirmed (and unconfirmed) destinations increases, so Rimbaud’s poetic output comes to an abrupt end. Indeed, just as Rimbaud’s final dateable poem appears in 1875, shortly before his 21st birthday, so he embarks upon the period of his most sustained and relentless travelling; for just as an earlier transformation was to see the schoolboy become the voyant, so 1875 appears to have marked another such reincarnation, as Rimbaud the poet becomes Rimbaud the vagrant, the pen set aside, finally and irrevocably, in favour of the wandering, often alone and usually on foot, which was to characterise so much of his later life.
From his earliest escapes from Charleville, it appears that Rimbaud had fallen upon the ideal method of travelling, a technique that was to stand him in good stead on future journeys. For complementing his predilection for marathon feats of long-distance pedestrianism, Rimbaud also discovered that legal expulsion was an economical way of getting around: by begging in the street until he was inevitably arrested, Rimbaud found himself repeatedly sent on to the next territory where he could begin the process again. In this way, notes Graham Robb, Rimbaud managed to get himself expelled through Europe, on one occasion being transported across Southern Germany before walking the 180 miles home to Charleville.56
But Rimbaud’s walking was not simply a whim or a pose: he was undeniably in search of adventure; but he was also destitute. There are, for example, at least two recorded occasions where his walking very nearly proved fatal. In late 1877, already set upon reaching Africa, Rimbaud embarked, on foot, for Alexandria. By the time he reached Marseilles, however, he was so ill that he was forced to abandon the attempt. The cause, according to his friend Ernest Delahaye, was ‘gastric fever and inflammation of the stomach-lining caused by rubbing of the sides against the abdomen in the course of excessive walking: this was, textually, the doctor’s diagnosis.’57 The following year, in a walk which was to foreshadow that of Hilaire Belloc some twenty years later, Rimbaud tried again, this time heading for Genoa, on a journey through the Vosges and on across the Alps via the Saint-Gothard pass: ‘Now you’re wading through snow more than a metre high. You can’t see your knees any more. You’re getting worked up now. Panting away, for in half an hour the blizzard could bury you without any trouble’.58 It was not until 1880 that Rimbaud finally left Europe for good, only returning to Marseilles to die in 1891. He was going ‘to traffick in the unknown’, embarking on an African adventure so extraordinarily picaresque as to now read more as myth than history. In this final period of Rimbaud’s life he was to transform himself for the final time, the vagrant and the wanderer giving way to the trader, the gun-runner, the explorer.59
As far as this account is concerned, however, Rimbaud remains, above all else, a walker. Verlaine had described Rimbaud as ‘l’homme aux semelles de vent’ – his feet, or shoes, had ‘soles of wind’; while another nickname was ‘l’oestre’, the gad-fly.60 But it was Ernest Delahaye, in 1876, who was to sketch the most enduring portrait of the vagrant, (ex-)poet, perpetually in transit, forever on the move:
Rimbaud was then still robust. He had the strong, supple look of a resolute and patient walker, who is always setting off, his long legs moving calmly and very regularly, his body straight, his head straight, his beautiful eyes fixed on the distance, and his face entirely filled with a look of resigned defiance, an air of expectation – ready for everything, without anger, without fear.61
1 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, ed. by Noah Porter, Springfield, MA: G&C Merriam, 1913, p. 1591
2 Arthur Rickett, The Vagabond in Literature, London: Dent, 1906, p. 3. ‘Sometimes the vagabond is a physical, sometimes only an intellectual wanderer’, writes Rickett, who goes on to identify a ‘spiritual brotherhood’ of such figures, numbering amongst their ranks: Hazlitt; De Quincey; Thoreau; Whitman and Stevenson.
3 See Vagrancy Act (1824), The UK Statute Law Database, at http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/
4 Joseph A. Amato writes: ‘Vagrancy, which had been proscribed since the early Middle Ages, unabatedly nagged at European society and continued to do so through modern European history. Trouble literally came on foot. Especially during bad times it came from the surrounding countryside in the form of straggling, destitute individuals and whole downtrodden families carrying all their worldly possessions on their backs. More terrifyingly, threat wore the face of independent armies, roving bands of peasants, and bandits intent on sacking the city.’ Amato, p. 68
5 Donna Landry, Radical Walking (2001) at http://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-transport/article_465.jsp
6 Landry, Radical Walking (2001)
7 Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 223
8 John Clare, ‘Sketches in the Life of John Clare by Himself’ in John Clare: The Journal, Essays, The Journey from Essex, ed. by Anne Tibble, Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1980, pp. 9–10
9 The definitive work on this subject is John Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Here, Barrell writes: ‘To enclose an open-field parish means in the first place to think of the details of its topography as quite erased from the map. The hostile and mysterious road-system was tamed and made unmysterious by being destroyed.’ (p 94)
10 John Clare, ‘The Mores’, in Major Works, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, with an introduction by Tom Paulin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 167–9
11 John Clare, ‘Sonnet: I dreaded walking where there was no path’ in John Clare: Everyman’s Poetry, ed. by RKR Thornton, London: Phoenix, 1997, pp. 9–10
12 Clare, ‘Sunday Walks’, in Major Works, p. 78
13 Donna Landry writes: ‘Going about the woods and fields writing poetry set John Clare sufficiently apart from his fellow villagers that he was the victim of speculation, with some believing him ‘crazd’, and others putting some more criminal interpretations to his rambles – that he was a ‘night walking associate with the gipseys robbing the woods of the hares and pheasants.’ Landry, The Invention of the Countryside, p. 83
14 Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 178
15Although written in 1841, the Journey from Essex only reached a wider audience through its inclusion in Frederick Martin’s biography of Clare, first published in 1865, which ‘made known to the public for the first time the extremity of what Clare endured.’ Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography, London: Picador, 2003, p. 538
16 Clare, ‘Journey out of Essex’, in Major Works, p. 433
17 Clare, ‘Journey out of Essex’, p. 434
18 Clare, ‘Journey out of Essex’, pp. 435–6
19 Clare, ‘Journey out of Essex’, p. 436
20 Clare, ‘Journey out of Essex’, p. 436
21 Clare, ‘Journey out of Essex’, p. 437
22 Clare, ‘Journey out of Essex’, p. 437
23 Clare, Major Works, Notes, p. 496
24 Bate, p. 3
25 Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005, pp. 126–7
26 Sinclair, Edge of the Orison, pp. 15 & 31
27 Sinclair, Edge of the Orison, pp. 11 & 122
28 Stephen Graham, ‘The Literature of Walking’, in The Tramp’s Anthology, p. x
29 Tom Paulin, ed., Clare, Major Works, Introduction, p. xxiii
30 Christine Photinos, The Tramp in American Literature (1873–1939) at http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ojs/index.php/ameriquests/article/download/62/60
31 A significant addition to this list is the name of WH Davies, author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) in which he describes his life as a vagrant in the US, Canada and the UK in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Despite losing a leg while riding the railroad in Canada, Davies continued to ‘tramp’ huge distances on his return to the UK, writing: ‘I would rather take a free country walk, leaving the roads for the less trodden paths of the hills and the lanes, than ride in a yacht or a coach.’ WH Davies, Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 148.
In her account of Davies’ life, Barbara Hooper has described the contrasting lifestyles of the American vagrant of Davies’ era and his counterpart in the UK, noting that ‘Begging in America was an almost legitimate lifestyle, far less despised than in England.’ ‘With a little rhetoric’, she adds, ‘a hobo’s life could even be described as respectable.’ This was certainly the view taken by Davies himself, who, on his arrival in America, soon gave up any idea of earning a living in favour of life on the road, ‘seeking to improve my mind and body as a tramp.’ Barbara Hooper, Time to Stand and Stare: A Life of WH Davies, Poet and Super-Tramp, London: Peter Owen, 2004, pp. 38–9
32 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of the Open Road’ in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. by Jerome Loving, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 120–1
33 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ in Leaves of Grass, p. 48
34 Letter from Emerson to Whitman, 21 July 1855, in Leaves of Grass, Appendix B, p. 463
35 Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, p. 243
36 Whitman, ‘To Think of Time’ in Leaves of Grass, p. 337
37 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ in Leaves of Grass, p. 73
38 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Vagabond’ (1896) in The Magic of Walking, ed. by Aaron Sussman & Ruth Goode, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980, p. 347. In her biography of Stevenson, Claire Harman notes that Stevenson was deeply affected by the ‘gospel’ of Walt Whitman: ‘Stevenson’, she writes, ‘admired, even venerated, the poet’s philosophy and hugely ambitious design. He later described Whitman as ‘a teacher who at a crucial moment of his youthful life had helped him to discover the right line of conduct.’’ Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, London: HarperCollins, 2005, p. 73
39 Marples, p. 152
40 Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and the Amateur Emigrant, ed. by Christopher MacLachlan, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 35. In 1964, the biographer, Richard Holmes, then 18, was to retrace Stevenson’s twelve-day journey across the Cévennes. Haunted by Stevenson and his account, Holmes’ journey, conducted entirely on foot, ‘was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps.’ See Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985, pp. 13–69
41 Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, p. 12
42 Stevenson, ‘Walking Tours’ (1876), in The Magic of Walking, 234–40, p. 235
43 Charles Nicholl, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880–91, London: Vintage, 1998, p. 21
44 Graham Robb writes: ‘It seemed as though every road was bound to return elliptically to the Ardennes until a certain escape velocity had been reached. Traced on a map, Rimbaud’s wanderings take the same palindromic form as some of the Illuminations – repetitions around a non-existent centre.’ See Robb, Rimbaud, London: Picador, 2000, p. 278
45 Nicholl, p. 24
46 Arthur Rimbaud, ‘A Season in Hell’ (1873), in Rimbaud Complete, ed. and trans. by Wyatt Mason, London: Scribner, 2003, p. 198
47 Nicholl, p. 26
48 Jack Kerouac, Rimbaud, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1960. According to his biographer, Graham Robb, Rimbaud displayed an interest in the figure of the vagrant from an early age, habitually talking to ‘strange men he met on the road – navvies, quarrymen and vagrants.’ ‘Even when they were drunk’, he told his friend Ernest Delahaye, ‘they were “closer to nature” and more truly intelligent than the educated hypocrites of his own class. These were men who, like Captain Rimbaud [Rimbaud’s father], could set off down the road and never come back.’ Robb, p. 40
49 Rimbaud is employing a pun here between voyou and voyant, the former meaning ‘a hooligan, a thug, a punk’, the latter ‘a prophet or visionary – literally a seer.’ See Nicholl, p. 26
50 Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Demeny, May 1871, in Nicholl, p. 26
51 Nicholl, p. 54
52 Rimbaud, ‘Workers’ in Rimbaud Complete, p. 239
53 Letter from Verlaine to Émile Blémond, in Nicholl, p. 53
54 Rimbaud, ‘Vagabonds’ in Rimbaud Complete, p. 244
55 Rimbaud, ‘My Bohemia: A Fantasy’ (1870), in Rimbaud Complete, p. 49. ‘For Rimbaud’, writes Graham Robb, ‘the point was to feel the regular thud of “rugged reality”. In “Ma Bohème” he had written of his “wounded shoes” with the compassionate attachment that a long-distance walker feels for his equipment. These were the simple tools that turned the world into a moving spectacle. In less than three months, he hammered out more than 600 miles on some of the most gruelling terrain in Southern Europe. The usual result of these marathons – though this can hardly be attributed to a conscious plan – was that he reduced himself to a state of helpless destitution.’ Robb, p. 269
56 Robb, Rimbaud, p. 277
57 Ernest Delahaye, qtd. in Nicholl, p. 80. Graham Robb has questioned this diagnosis, however, suggesting that it might have been a product of Rimbaud’s imagination: ‘This unusual affliction might have been invented by Rimbaud. The idea that walking wears the stomach thin would be quite at home among the paradoxes of his chansons: even the arrangement of internal organs is self-defeating.’ Robb, p. 292
58 Nicholl, p. 81
59 Rimbaud’s years in Africa between 1880 and his death in 1891 remain largely undocumented. Even here, however, one finds further evidence of Rimbaud’s prowess as a walker, with one friend from this period, Dimitri Righas, recalling: ‘He was a great walker. Oh, an astonishing walker!’ See Nicholl, p. 261
60 Nicholl, p. 71
61 Rimbaud described by Ernest Delahaye in Nicholl, pp. 74–5. Graham Robb, commenting on Delahaye’s description, writes: ‘By now, his body was tuned to long distances, though not always capable of covering them. Like verse or music, walking was a rhythmical skill, a combination of trance and productive activity. Delahaye’s description of the athletic pedestrian suggests a special state of existence, a happy delegation of responsibility to blood and muscle.’ (Robb, p. 277)