Blake is supposed to walk endlessly in London – he knows what he’s doing. Iain Sinclair1
I am afraid that “wandering a little” is almost a hobby of mine. Arthur Machen2
Just as the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau was to imbue their apprehension of the natural world with a sense of the otherworldly, so too was a similar shift in perception taking place on the streets of London. For while Wordsworth and his Romantic counterparts were to celebrate the sublime landscapes of rural Britain, they were also to depict the dark and alienating expanses of urban London, introducing an image of the city as labyrinthine and unknowable.3 Here we are presented with an image of the city at night, and the figure of the night walker who reveals, with dreamlike intensity, his vision of the city’s underworld.
The literary tradition of the city night walk originates almost a century earlier in John Gay’s Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), Book II of which is entitled, ‘Of Walking the Streets by Night.’ Gay’s vision of the city is neither dreamlike nor visionary, however, instead depicting the city as an assault course, bristling with an array of physical and moral hazards with which to ensnare the unwary traveller:
Through Winter Streets to steer your Course aright,
How to walk clean by Day, and safe by Night,
How jostling Crowds, with Prudence, to decline,
When to assert the Wall, and when resign,
I sing: Thou Trivia, Goddess, aid my Song,
Thro’ spacious Streets conduct thy Bard along;
By thee transported, I securely stray
Where winding Alleys lead the doubtful Way,
The silent Court, and op’ning Square explore,
And long perplexing Lanes untrod before.4
Gay’s parody describes an art of urban walking which owes little to any aesthetic sentiment, instead revealing a carefully honed technique for navigating a hostile environment. Indeed, it is precisely the idea of a pedestrian-poet and the incongruity that such a figure would suggest which lends the poem its satiric force. For the middle-class readership for which Gay’s poem was intended would certainly have looked upon the act of walking with some disdain, as befitting an activity largely associated with the likelihood of assault or some other indignity at the hands of the marauding urban poor.
Trivia reads, then, as a walker’s handbook, a text directed not at the carefree wanderer but towards the resolute pedestrian and it offers no attempt to seek beneath the surface or to distance oneself from the crowd (except as a measure of self-protection). Neither does the poem attempt to map out a route in any recognisable manner, instead offering a series of discrete coordinates which do little to convey any sense of the city in its entirety.5 Perhaps it is as a result of these deficiencies that Gay’s poem is so little read today, and yet in the following passage he anticipates a wholly different chronicler of the city and its inhabitants:
But sometimes let me leave the noisie Roads,
And silent wander in the close Abodes
Where wheels ne’er shake the Ground; there pensive stray,
In studious Thought the long uncrowded Way.
Here I remark each Walker’s diff’rent Face,
And in their Look their various Bus’ness trace.6
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, William Blake was to retrace Gay’s steps, once again searching the faces of London’s populace as they pass through the city’s streets:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.7
While Gay keeps his distance, however, and encourages his readers to do the same, Blake’s work is bound up with his experience of the city to the extent that his own identity and that of London itself seem to become indivisible: ‘My streets are my, Ideas of Imagination’, he was to write.8 For Blake too was a wanderer, a poet whose vision was born on foot as he walked the city streets:
From the beginning he was the child of the dream of London. As a boy he walked everywhere. He walked south from Soho towards Dulwich and Camberwell. He walked north as well as south. He crossed the Oxford Road towards Tottenham Court Road, where he turned left into St Giles High Street. He passed Hanway Street and Percy Street and Windmill Street before coming to the turnpike that marked the crossing of the New Road from Paddington to St Pancras. He had so much energy that he could not help but walk. Yet he was propelled by his own sense of destiny, inescapably caught up in his experience of London. He was chosen to understand the city.9
Born in London, the city in which he was to spend almost his entire life, William Blake (1757–1827) began his career as an apprentice engraver and student at the Royal Academy. His two-fold passion for engraving and poetry was to result in a unique body of work – a series of illuminated books in which the battle between the anti-rational forces of the imagination and the repressive and systematic forces of authority is revealed. In his biography of Blake, Peter Ackroyd writes, ‘It is characteristic of so lonely and separate a boy that Blake’s principal childhood memory is of solitary walking […] He had a very strong sense of place, and all his life he was profoundly and variously affected by specific areas of London.’10 He is, declares Ackroyd, a ‘Cockney Visionary’, whose awareness of London’s symbolic existence through time allowed him to perceive the unchanging reality of the city beneath the flux of the everyday; a transcendent image of ‘the spiritual Four-fold London eternal.’11 And it is through precisely this superimposition of his own highly individualistic worldview upon the topography of London’s streets that Blake is able to create such startling juxtapositions between the familiar and the transcendent; thus was he to perceive angels in the unlikely environs of Peckham Rye and to provide precise coordinates for the New Jerusalem:
The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood:
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalems pillars stood.12
While later in the same poem, Jerusalem (1804–20), Blake guides the reader (and walker) on an inward passage through London’s eastern perimeter:
He came down from Highgate thro Hackney & Holloway towards London / Till he came to old Stratford & thence to Stepney & the Isle / Of Leuthas Dogs, thence thro the narrows of the Rivers side / And saw every minute particular,
the jewels of Albion, running down / The kennels of the streets & lanes as if they were abhorrd.13
Blake remaps the city as he walks its streets, leading Iain Sinclair to describe him as ‘the godfather of all psychogeographers’; and it is through his emphasis upon the imaginative reconstruction of the city that Blake takes his place within a tradition of London writing that foreshadows many of the themes later to be gathered under this label.14 It is the act of walking, however, which remains implicit to any such tradition, an activity that Blake was to imbue with a visionary power:
And all this Vegetable World appeard on my left Foot,
As a bright sandal formd immortal of precious stones & gold:
I stooped down & bound it on to walk forward thro’ Eternity.15
Having been almost wholly neglected during his lifetime, it appears that Blake is still inspiring us to walk the city more than 150 years after his death16; yet in the pantheon of London visionaries, it is not Blake, but a later arrival to the city, who can perhaps claim the greatest credit for having established the image of the urban walker within the public imagination. Born in Manchester in 1785, Thomas De Quincey was never to attain quite the affinity with London which Blake was to achieve; but his depictions of the city reveal exactly that visionary intensity which was to animate Blake’s work, creating a pioneering account of urban alienation in which the solitary walker comes to symbolise the modern city.
In 1802, De Quincey, aged sixteen, ran, or rather walked, away from Manchester Grammar School, covering thirty-eight miles in two days en route to Chester where his mother was staying. It was decided that a walking-tour would be good for De Quincey’s health, and he was allowed to continue on into Wales where he soon settled into ‘a tempo of no more than between 70 and 100 miles a week.’17 It was here that De Quincey developed a passion for pedestrianism which would stay with him for life. ‘Life on this model was but too delightful’, he was to write, ‘and to myself especially, that am never thoroughly in health unless when having pedestrian exercise to the extent of fifteen miles at the most, and eight to ten miles at the least.’18 De Quincey was to feel no disgrace travelling through Wales as a pedestrian, as most of the Welsh travelled in the same manner at this time. Across the border in England, however, and this situation was reversed, with the would-be pedestrian viewed by English landlords, according to the admittedly sensitive De Quincey, as carrying ‘the most awful shadow and shibboleth of the pariah.’19 Indeed, De Quincey was deterred from walking on to London by precisely this fear of the humiliations he was likely to encounter. ‘Happily the scandal of pedestrianism’, he was to write, ‘is in one respect more hopefully situated than that of scrofula or leprosy; it is not in any case written in your face.’20
Of course, De Quincey did make it to London, and it is his account of his time there, alongside his earlier adventures in Wales, that form the basis of his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). De Quincey wrote the first draft of this work at the age of 36, returning to it with notes and amendments throughout his life; and so the experiences recounted there are not only coloured by his self consciously dramatic style, but must also be viewed through the distorting mirrors of both memory and the opium dream itself. Those wishing to find the harsh realism of the addict’s spiral into despair and self-destruction will, therefore, be disappointed; for the Confessions are concerned only nominally with addiction, and it should be remembered that in De Quincey’s day opium was both legal and cheaply acquired, having none of the edgy and alienated connotations that might be attributed to drugs today. Instead, the Confessions should be read principally as an account of the role of the imagination and the power of dreams to transmute the familiar nature of our surroundings into something strange and wonderful. It is here that De Quincey’s true legacy lies, as a prototype for the obsessive wanderer, allowing his imagination to shape and direct the perception of his environment; his purposeless drifting at odds with the commercial traffic and allying him to the invisible underclass whose movements map the chaotic and labyrinthine aspects of the city:
Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience.21
De Quincey’s dreamlike vision of an unknown London awaiting discovery is particularly appealing to those who are all too familiar with its well-trodden streets22; and given that De Quincey’s opium use seemingly resulted in little of the torpor usually associated with the drug, instead appearing to propel him through the city, his solitary and often nocturnal wandering would certainly have introduced him to a side of the city still invisible to many of its inhabitants. ‘Being myself at that time of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets’, writes De Quincey, ‘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.’23 One such tragic figure was the young prostitute Ann, whose friendship and support De Quincey credited with keeping him alive, and whose loss he was to feel so keenly; for having briefly left London, De Quincey had arranged to meet Ann on Oxford Street on his return, but despite his prolonged attempts to find her they never saw each other again.
Another source of friendship to De Quincey in London at this time was the legendary walker, explorer and full-blown eccentric, John ‘Walking’ Stewart (1749–1822). Stewart was reputed to have wandered on foot throughout Europe, India and North America, and De Quincey was later to make him the subject of an affectionate essay.24 Little is known about the facts of Stewart’s life, however, as he wrote little about his travels and was a notoriously unreliable witness to the events of his own past. He did write, however, and amongst his many works of ‘philosophy’ are such intriguing titles as The Apocalypse of Human Perfectibility (1808) and Roll of a Tennis Ball through the Moral World (1812). Perhaps, it has been speculated, his amnesia regarding the details of his own life story was due to brain damage, since apparently ‘the crown of his head was indented nearly an inch in depth by the blow of ‘some warlike instrument.’25 ‘No region’, wrote De Quincey, ‘pervious to human feet except, I think, China and Japan, but had been visited by Mr. Stewart in this philosophical style; a style which compels a man to move slowly through a country, and to fall in continually with the natives of that country.’26
Having left London, De Quincey was never again able to fully disassociate the act of walking from his growing reliance on opium. He came to the view that walking could mitigate both the ill effects of the drug and the persistent digestive disorders which necessitated its use, and for this reason he habitually walked for three or four hours every evening.27 In this way, De Quincey’s health, at least as he regarded it, came to depend on walking, which became not merely a pleasure but a necessity. Walking to combat the melancholia induced by the drug, De Quincey’s compulsion to keep moving reached the point at which he could only truly claim to be himself when on foot. Yet over the course of his long life, as his faith in the curative powers of pedestrianism increased, De Quincey struggled to remain one step ahead of his myriad ailments. This process reached a critical juncture in 1843 when De Quincey found himself stricken by a serious circulatory illness, as his biographer, Grevel Lindop, describes:
He resolved on a policy of ‘kill or cure.’ Pacing out the tiny triangular cottage garden as soon as he was able to walk again, he found that one circuit of its perimeter measured forty-four yards, so that forty rounds were exactly required for one mile. He began to exercise there daily, doggedly walking round and round the garden, keeping count of his circuits by placing pebbles on the rungs in the back of a chair to form a primitive abacus. Before long he was averaging eleven or twelve miles a day so that, as he said proudly, ‘I had within ninety days walked a thousand miles.’28
As an example of De Quincey’s unswerving belief in the remedial power of walking, his thousand-mile walking cure is a triumph of the will that anticipates Albert Speer’s similarly repetitive circling of Spandau’s prison garden more than a century later. But De Quincey’s most active years as a pedestrian were to come in his first few years at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, which he leased from Wordsworth in 1809; for as an admirer of Wordsworth, and as one who now lived in his former home, De Quincey no doubt felt more than usually inspired to walk during this period.29 Whether motivated by concerns over his health or simply out of a Wordsworthian desire to keep in motion, De Quincey continued his often obsessive walking routine throughout his life. In 1855, at the age of seventy, he was still managing seven miles a day: ‘Not much, certainly’, he was to write, ‘but as much as I can find spirits for.’30
In his recent novel, The Unnamed (2010), Joshua Ferris describes a man suffering from a peculiar affliction: the inability to stop walking. Mercilessly propelled across America as his life disintegrates around him, Ferris portrays a man stuck in a permanent escape mode, a man whose feet have come to rule his head. Such a scenario is, of course, a highly imaginative literary conceit, but it is also one which is grounded in earlier accounts of, admittedly less extreme, but nevertheless acute, forms of peripatetic compulsion.
‘If I couldn’t walk fast and far’, confided Charles Dickens in 1857, ‘I should explode and perish.’31 While elsewhere he was to claim, ‘My only comfort is, in Motion.’32 And of all the literary forbears to Ferris’s novel, both real and imagined, it is surely Dickens himself who offers the most startling example of a man whose pedestrian endeavours came to dominate his life. Yet for such a prodigious walker, one struggles largely in vain to locate a major pedestrian episode within his fiction. There are, however, numerous walking scenes within the novels, which are often peopled by an array of footsore Londoners, whose principal function appears to be to reveal the city to the reader.33 Of these, Miles Jebb has compiled the following selection: Oliver Twist’s twenty-mile walk to rob a house in Chertsey; David Copperfield’s twenty-three-mile walk from Blackheath to Chatham; the Pickwick Club’s twenty-five mile walk at Dingley Dell; Nicholas Nickleby and Smike and their flight from Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire to London; and finally Martin Chuzzlewit and Tom Pinch’s invigorating walk to dinner in Salisbury, which leads them to exclaim: ‘Better! A rare, strong, hearty, healthy walk – four statute miles an hour – preferable to that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking, scraping, creaking, villainous old gig. Why, the two things will not admit of comparison. It is an insult to the walk, to set them side by side.’34
It is, however, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) which remains the only one of Dickens’ novels to provide the reader with a sustained walking episode crucial to the narrative structure of the book; in this instance, Nell Trent’s long walk out of London with her grandfather. Indeed, The Old Curiosity Shop is also noteworthy for its opening passage, in which the narrator acts as a mouthpiece for Dickens’ own attitude to walking:
Night is generally my time for walking. In the summer I often leave home early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day, or even escape for days or weeks together, but saving in the country I seldom go out until after dark, though, Heaven be thanked, I love its light and feel the cheerfulness it sheds upon the earth, as much as any creature living.
I have fallen insensibly into this habit, both because it favours my infirmity and because it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. The glare and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to idle pursuits like mine; a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street lamp or shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight, and, if I must add the truth, night is kinder in this respect than day, which too often destroys an air-built castle at the moment of its completion, without the smallest ceremony or remorse.35
These remarks were later to find factual confirmation in Dickens’ celebrated essay, ‘Night Walks’ (1859), and it is here, in his journalism, rather than in the novels, that Dickens’ profound and often tortured relationship with walking is laid bare: ‘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 […] In the course of those nights, I finished my education in a fair amateur experience of houselessness.’36 Dickens assumes here the identity of ‘houselessness’(today’s homelessness), to explore the night-time city, depicting London as a never-ending panorama of empty streets concealing a population of the hopeless and the lost: ‘Walking the streets under the pattering rain, Houselessness would walk and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of streets.’37 Dickens imbues his vision of the city with a lurking menace that recalls the darkest imaginings of De Quincey before him, but while De Quincey was able to view the city through the prism of the opium dream, Dickens’ sense of heightened anxiety appears innate, or at least a consequence of his earliest memories of the streets.
Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of Dickens, imagines him as a small boy walking through the streets of London to his place of work and home again. ‘Walking, and wandering,’ he notes, ‘seem to comprise a large part of Dickens’s early years in London; but that was quite usual in the period […] But by his own account Dickens’s wanderings were of a more shiftless and dreamy nature.’38 While in his essay ‘Shy Neighbourhoods’ (1860), the piece of writing in which he confronts most clearly the role of walking in his work, Dickens states:
My walking is of two kinds: one straight on end to a definite goal at a sound 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.39
It is the latter, ‘objectless’ drifting which Dickens employs to such great effect in his descriptions of London’s labyrinthine topography, his aimless motion allowing to him to capture the city in all its immeasurable complexity. And yet, it is the former, obsessive and relentless movement which came to define Dickens’ own life, as increasingly, and through displays of astonishing athleticism, he sought to escape from his difficulties, on foot, and at speed:
So much of my travelling is done on foot, that if I cherished betting 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. Mile after mile I walked, without the slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming constantly.40
Dickens was by no means unique in his desire to pace the streets at high speed. Indeed, along with Ruskin, another speed-walker, Dickens was merely one of many such figures whose activities may be compared to the joggers of today.41 Where Dickens stands apart from his contemporaries, however, is in the degree of significance with which he was to endow his pedestrian endeavours. In his essay, ‘On an Amateur Beat’ (1860), Dickens compares the role of the walker to that of a policeman, in which even the most idle stroll is attributed a higher purpose: ‘On such an occasion,’ he writes, ‘it is my habit to regard my work as my beat, and myself as a higher sort of police-constable doing duty on the same.’42 Here, Dickens, like Wordsworth before him, likens the act of walking to that of work, a labour to be performed rather than a diversion to be enjoyed. Indeed, as he became older and his walking routines became increasingly arduous, both for himself and his companions,43 so did his relationship to walking change; as what had begun as an escape, a diversion from the pressures of life, gradually became a necessity and, finally, an obligation that he felt compelled to discharge:
These “daily constitutionals”, as he sometimes called them, in fact turned into something of an obsession and it came to be his settled opinion that it was important for him to spend as many hours walking as he did working. It became what he described as a “moral obligation.” His steady pace was some four and a half miles per hour, and it was quite common for him to walk twenty or even thirty miles at a stretch. The covering of such distances was not an uncommon feat in those early nineteenth-century years […] But what was different about Dickens was the speed and the determination of his perambulation. In later life it was to be the means of warding off melancholy or a way of fighting off the worries which beset him but, in those early years, it can be fruitfully seen as the blowing off of superfluous energy.44
As an antidote to the growing anxieties of his everyday existence, however, ever greater distances were required to achieve a state of equilibrium. Dickens’ walks were soon to be characterised by a persistent state of fervour as he fought to outpace his lurking and ever-present fears, and in this sense his growing mania for long-distance walking came to assume the form of a disease.45 Such an obsession was to prove highly destructive, both to him and to those of his companions who were lamed in the process. But whether, as some have speculated, these ferocious pedestrian routines were to prove a contributory factor in his death, it is impossible to verify. In the end, however, in a curious reflection of De Quincey’s addiction to opium, which had propelled him through his phantasmagoric visions of night-time London, so did this very act of propulsion become Dickens’ own addiction, and one which he too came to depend on to fulfil his creative needs.
While Blake, De Quincey and Dickens each holds a prominent place within the canon of literary walkers, the figure of Arthur Machen is one which is routinely overlooked; his name is absent from all the major histories of the subject, and his works remain largely neglected. Of course, his absence here simply reflects his marginal position within wider literary history, yet while he is unlikely ever to be elevated to a dominant position within the literary canon, his significance as a literary walker is at least as great as that of his more celebrated forbears. For no other figure has ever walked London’s streets in quite the way that Machen did, nor has anyone else ever described them with such a mixture of reverence and awe:
London is a bus that no one has ever caught. It is an ocean that no one has voyaged all over, whether in body or in spirit […] I do not think that there are any more awful concepts presented to the human mind than the eternities and infinitudes of time and space […] And the sight of a map of London always leaves me with a sense of a kind of lesser infinitude if the phrase may be allowed. Here are marked streets and alleys and squares and bye-ways, which strike the eye as past numbering. They were all here, in undoubted brick and stone and marble and mortar, and yet one feels that no living man has trodden them all; that to the most energetic and leisured explorer there must ever be myriads of streets that he will never enter. And, extending the notion, how many houses must remain unvisited; secrets throughout all ages to all but a very few?
Thus does London make for us a concrete image of the eternal things of space and time and thought.46
Born in 1863 in Caerleon on Usk, in Gwent, South Wales, Arthur Machen47 was the son of an Anglican vicar and was raised in the rectory of Llandewi church. The Gwent countryside had a profound impact on him, and it was the enchanted landscapes of his youth which were to provoke the sense of mystic wonder which later came to inform his work. Machen described his life until the age of seventeen as all ‘solitude and woods and deep lanes and wonder’ and he adopted early the habit of wandering on long walks in the countryside around his home.48
Unable to afford a place at Oxford, and having failed the exams for medical school in London, Machen was soon to leave Gwent permanently for London, and it was here, while enduring a lonely and impecunious existence, that he was to begin the series of long rambling walks across the city that were to form the backdrop to so much of his future writing. Avoiding the centre and striking out for the vast and desolate expanses of the suburban city, Machen came to imbue these overlooked outer limits, with their endless streets of Victorian villas, with exactly that sense of otherworldly enchantment that had coloured his experiences of the Gwent countryside. For ‘the unknown world’, he wrote, ‘is about us everywhere, everywhere near to our feet; the thinnest veil separates us from it, the door in the wall or the next street communicates with it.’49 It was a message that he was to repeat throughout his work:
Here, then, is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes […] I think it is easier to discern the secret beauty and wonder and mystery in humble and common things than in the splendid and noble and storied things.50
Machen’s first major success was to come in 1894 with The Great God Pan, a tale of pagan horror with a powerful and barely concealed sexual undertow; and the following year he was to publish a novel of interwoven tales, The Three Impostors, an equally shocking work of decadent horror. But in the climate of fin de siècle excess that was to scandalise London in the 1890s, Machen’s work quickly became associated with the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde, and he was to suffer as a result: the backlash against Wilde that followed his trial in 1895 ensured that many of Machen’s finest works written in the latter part of that decade were to remain unpublished until well into the next century. The most notable of these, and Machen’s acknowledged masterpiece, was The Hill of Dreams (1907), a largely autobiographical tale of a young man’s struggle to become a writer in London. Machen himself experienced real hardship as a fledgling writer, a period he was later to recall as one of intense loneliness and endless wandering:
I lived a life of such desperate loneliness that I might almost have been Robinson Crusoe on his Island […] though I walked daily amidst myriads I was yet alone […] I think I see the young man with the moustache slouching along the roads, always alone […] Day after day I wandered about in this fashion.51
It was in the early 1890s, however, while living in Soho Street and later, between 1893 and 1895, while living on Great Russell Street, in Bloomsbury, that Machen’s daily walks outward through London’s unknown and unloved hinterlands began to develop a more systematic tenor. For what had previously been little more than a flight from loneliness and desperation had gradually become something quite different, a deliberate and sustained attempt to access the eternal and ineffable which, he believed, lay behind the everyday reality of London’s streets. Setting out to lose himself, willingly, amidst those ‘raw, red places all around the walls of London’, Machen embarked on a journey whose sole guidance was the need to ‘utterly shun the familiar.’52 So Machen’s ‘London Science’ was born:
I will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these are […] But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten […] Of all this the follower of the London Art must purge himself when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.53
‘Sometimes’, writes Machen, ‘I took a friend with me on my journeys, but not often. The secret of it all was hidden from them, and they were apt to become violent.’54 Machen was later to move to the Verulam Buildings off the Gray’s Inn Road, and it was here, while taking his customary midday stroll, that he was to experience a sudden sense of disorientation: ‘I got home somehow by complicated and dubious calculations,’ recalled Machen, ‘and in a somewhat confused and alarmed frame of mind. And odd as it may seem, this perplexity has never wholly left me.55 Indeed, it was exactly this sense of perplexity that was to characterise Machen’s best writing about London, a city he came to view with both wonder and dread:
And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. “The matter of our work is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of King’s Cross Station.56
Towards the end of his third and final volume of autobiography, entitled The London Adventure, or, the Art of Wandering (1924), the text which inspired the title for this book, Machen returns once again to the sense of perplexity that always accompanied him on his travels across London: ‘So, here was the notion.’ he writes, ‘What about a tale of a man who “lost his way”; who became so entangled in some maze of imagination and speculation that the common, material ways of the world became of no significance to him?’57 It is something of an understatement to describe The London Adventure as a digressive or meandering work, for it is in fact little more than a sustained attempt to avoid the task he has set himself, an attempt, in literary form, to capture the aimlessness which defined his urban wandering. For throughout much of Machen’s work, but especially here and in his previous volumes of autobiography, Far Off Things (1922) and Things Near and Far (1923), his prose seems to direct the reader in one direction, only to veer off at an unexpected tangent; his most insightful comments often appear in an oblique form, seemingly mentioned only in passing, remaining always in the shadow of other objectives, themselves never clearly articulated. In this way, and in the manner of so many of the writers and walkers gathered here, Machen’s work can closely resemble the nature of the walks he describes. So, for example, the sensational fiction from the late nineteenth century, on which Machen’s reputation, as it is, now largely rests, repeatedly depicts the dandified and slightly disreputable character of the flâneur as he strolls his way through the occult puzzle of London’s streets58; while in later works, Machen’s wanderings anticipate the overtly aimless yet curiously regimented walks soon to be conducted by the Surrealists, and later the Situationists, on the streets of Paris. Yet, ultimately, Machen’s London Science, while anticipating, at least in part, the activities of these later avant-garde groups, remains unique and unclassifiable, a project peculiar to Machen himself.
Where Machen’s outlook diverges so dramatically from that of both his contemporaries and his would-be successors, however, is in the sheer ambivalence of his reaction to the city he took such painstaking efforts to describe. For while he was, on the one hand, to celebrate London in all its immensity and to revel in the occult preoccupations of his fiction, his own response to the endless horizon of streets within which he found himself, was that of an overwhelming sense of awe, bordering upon outright terror.59 Indeed, much of Machen’s work can be viewed as a means of combating precisely this sense of dread; an attempt to gain mastery over London’s streets by walking them, and through this knowledge a means of countering their menace. This, of course, as Machen knew only too well, was the work of many lifetimes, a gargantuan and never-ending project whose goal was to come to terms with a city whose perimeter was always out of sight and whose perpetual growth seemed always to outstrip the attempts of those who sought to capture it in its entirety. And it is this image, which remains the abiding symbol of his work, that of the solitary walker seeking an escape from the labyrinth, yet fated to spend a lifetime in doing so:
Years ago, I remember, I used to wander, by day and night, about the western limits and outposts of this most vast London. I would go out and pass from street to street with the purpose of escaping from London and attaining the true country. The streets at last faded into open fields, and I would say ‘I am free at last from this mighty and stony wilderness.’ And then suddenly, as I turned a corner the raw red rows of houses would confront me, and I knew that I was still in the labyrinth […] This was thirty years ago or more, and since then London has swollen like a flood. Its extent is mighty almost beyond the power of imagination, huge in a way that no mileage and figures can express.60
1 Iain Sinclair, Blake’s London: The Topographic Sublime, London: Swedenborg Society, 2011, p. 25
2 Arthur Machen, The London Adventure, or the Art of Wandering, London: Martin Secker, 1924, p. 69
3 This urban metaphor is most powerfully conveyed by De Quincey and Dickens, but is prefigured by Wordsworth in his account of his ‘London Residence’ in Book VII of the Prelude, in which he writes: ‘Private Courts,/ Gloomy as coffins, and unsightly lanes,/[…] May then entangle us awhile,/Conducted through those labyrinths unawares.’ Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, in Major Works, p. 473
4 John Gay, ‘Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London’ in Clare Brant & Susan Whyman, eds., Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 169–219, p. 170
5 For this reason, those attempting to follow in Gay’s footsteps across London today are likely to be disappointed: ‘In my attempt to walk some of the spaces represented in Trivia, it was abundantly clear that using the poem like a map was impossible because places are not represented in an orderly or logical way – the journey is more like sticking a pin in a map, than following a linear route.’ Alison Stenton, ‘Spatial Stories: Movement in the City and Cultural Geography’, in Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716), 62–74, p. 70
6 Gay, ‘Trivia’, p. 185
7 William Blake, ‘London’, in The Complete Poems, ed. by Alicia Ostriker, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 128
8 Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, in The Complete Poems, p. 700
9 Peter Ackroyd, ‘The London that Became Jerusalem’, in The Times, March 3, 2007 and at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article1461686.ece
10 Peter Ackroyd, Blake, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995, pp. 30–1
11 Blake, ‘Milton’, in The Complete Poems, p. 521
12 Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, in The Complete Poems, p. 686
13 Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, in The Complete Poems, p. 725. ‘So here was a very interesting series of instructions’, writes Iain Sinclair, describing this passage, ‘a particular kind of walk, and quite an eccentric journey laid out, a trajectory which is both spiritual and physical’. See Sinclair, Blake’s London, p. 17
14 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, London: Granta, 1997, p. 208. Blake has proved crucial in moulding Sinclair’s own perception of the city: ‘The triangle of concentration. A sense of this and of all the other triangulations of the city: Blake, Bunyan, Defoe, the dissenting monuments in Bunhill Fields. Everything I believe in, everything that London can do to you, starts there.’ Sinclair, Lights Out, p. 34
15 Blake, ‘Milton’, in The Complete Poems, p. 554
16 For a practical example of Blake’s influence upon contemporary London walking, see ‘Blakewalking’ by Thomas Wright at http://www.timwright.typepad.com/L_O_S/. Here Blakewalking is described as ‘a new way of conversing, participating, publishing, performing and creating on the hoof. The aim of Blakewalking is to transform an everyday walk into a Visionary Experience. We want you to join us out on the streets, on the web and on your mobile – making notes, recording thoughts and feelings, responding to the world we walk through – and the world within.’
17 Marples, p. 59
18 Marples, p. 60
19 Marples, p. 63
20 Marples, p. 63
21 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. by Barry Milligan, London: Penguin, 2003, pp. 53–4. Just as Blake stands as a symbolic representative of a retrospective psychogeographic tradition, so may De Quincey be described as psychogeography’s first actual practitioner. For the drug-fuelled journeys through the London of De Quincey’s youth seem to capture exactly that state of aimless drift and detached observation which were to become the hallmarks of the Situationist dérive some 150 years later; and as Phil Baker has claimed: ‘Classic urban psychogeography could almost be said to begin – retrospectively, and from a Situationist influenced perspective – with Thomas De Quincey.’ See Baker, p. 326
22 Geoff Nicholson writes: ‘De Quincey’s fantasy of an unknown London is an attractive one, since London is, in every sense I can think of, exceptionally well-trodden territory: a place of walkers, with a two-thousand-year-old history of pedestrianism […] No part of London is genuinely unknown. However obscure or hidden the place and its history, somebody has already discovered it, walked it, staked a claim to it. Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking, p. 41
23 De Quincey, Confessions, p. 24
24 ‘Walking Stewart’ was to appear in two essays written by De Quincey, the first published in The London Magazine (September, 1823) and the second in Tait’s Magazine (October, 1840). The former can be accessed at http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/47766/
25 Jebb, p. 127
26 De Quincey, ‘Sketches of Life & Manners’ (October, 1840) in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. by Grevel Lindop, London: Chatto & Pickering, 2000–2003, vol. 11, 245–260, p. 246, and qtd. in Solnit, p. 108–9
27 Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, London: Dent, 1981, p. 246
28 Lindop, p. 349
29 Marples, p. 63
30 Marples, p. 66
31 Charles Dickens, letter to John Forster (1857), qtd. in Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, London: Yale University Press, 2009, p. 382
32 Charles Dickens, in a letter to his wife, 8 November, 1844, and qtd. in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990, p. 444
33 Describing him as an urban counterpart to Thoreau, Joseph A. Amato claims that Dickens wanted to illustrate London from the walker’s perspective, ‘to explain the half that walks to the half that rides.’ ‘In more than one work’, he writes, Dickens ‘explained dark, grimy, ashen, toil-laden, hunger-filled, and foot-weary London to the glittering and glamorous world of carriages and boulevards, of selective ambling and ostentatious strolling.’ Amato, pp. 176–7
34 Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. by Patricia Ingham, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 194, qtd. alongside other examples of walking in Dickens, in Jebb, pp. 91–92
35 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop: A Tale, ed. by Norman Page, London: Penguin, 2000, p. 9
36 Charles Dickens, ‘Night Walks’, in The Uncommercial Traveller, Stroud: Nonsuch Publishing, 2007, Chapter XIII, p. 138
37 Dickens, ‘Night Walks’, p. 139
38 Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 87. In making this observation Ackroyd echoes the words of GK Chesterton, perhaps Dickens’ most astute critic, who notes that the realism employed by Dickens is born of exactly this mode of dreamlike motion: ‘And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly.’ Warming to his theme, Chesterton continues: ‘Few of us understand the street. 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 secret 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; his stars were the lamps of the street; his hero was the man in the street. He could open the inmost door of his house – the door that leads into that secret passage which is lined with houses and roofed with stars.’ GK Chesterton, Charles Dickens, London: Wordsworth Editions, 2007, pp. 24–5
39 Dickens, ‘Shy Neighbourhoods’, in The Uncommercial Traveller, Chapter X, p. 106
40 Dickens, ‘Shy Neighbourhoods’, p. 105
41 Jebb, p. 89
42 Dickens, ‘On an Amateur Beat’, in The Uncommercial Traveller, Chapter X, p. 75
43 Peter Ackroyd has described how Dickens’s guests were frequently subjected to a punishing walk of twelve miles in two and a half hours, with only a five-minute break. An ordeal often endured in complete silence. Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 930
44 Ackroyd, Dickens, pp. 291–2
45 Wallace, p. 232
46 Arthur Machen, ‘The Joy of London’ (1914) in The Secret of the Sangraal and Other Writings, Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2007, p. 78
47 Christened Arthur Llewellyn Jones, the correct pronunciation of Machen’s (mæk
n) adopted surname (his mother’s maiden name) has long since been the subject of debate, perhaps to his detriment. Such confusion prompted the novelist and critic, Cyril Connolly, to suggest that ‘If I had been Arthur Machen, I would have added “rhymes with bracken” to my signature by deed-poll, for nothing harms an author’s sales like an ambiguity in the pronunciation of his name.’ See Gary Lachman, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse, Sawtry: Dedalus, 2003, p. 220 (n. 28)
48 Mark Valentine, Arthur Machen, Bridgend: Seren, 1995, p. 9. ‘Journeying was important for Machen’, notes Valentine, ‘from the long solitary rambles of his youth to the explorations of remotest London and his days as a “strolling player.’’ Quoting from Machen’s The Secret Glory (1922), he adds: ‘We came very near to the ideal life which man was meant to lead. Who can measure the excellent effects of vagabondage, of the continual rolling which keeps the stone clean of moss and lichen?’ Valentine, p. 66
49 Arthur Machen, The London Adventure, or the Art of Wandering, London: Martin Secker, 1924, p. 100. The ‘door in the wall’ that Machen describes here recalls the short story of the same name by HG Wells, in which the protagonist, having as a schoolboy located a door leading to an enchanted realm, spends the remainder of his life attempting to rediscover it. Wells’ story, first published in 1906, also has strong affinities with Machen’s later story ‘N’, published in 1936, which concerns the search to rediscover a similarly enchanted domain. See HG Wells, ‘The Door in the Wall’ (1906) in The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, ed. by Patrick Parrinder, London: Penguin, 2007, pp. 365–381, and Arthur Machen, N, Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2010
50 Arthur Machen, The London Adventure, p. 75. Machen’s highly idiosyncratic worldview has much in common with that of another equally neglected writer, John Cowper Powys. Powys, like Machen, was also alert to the connection between walking and creativity, and used himself to walk prodigious distances in search of inspiration. For an analysis of the role of walking in his work, see Mark Boseley, Walking in the Creative Life of John Cowper Powys: The Triumph of the Peripatetic Mode, Västeras, Sweden: Mälardalens Högskola, 2001
51 Machen, ‘When I was Young in London’ (1913) in The Secret of the Sangraal and Other Writings, p. 66
52 Machen, The London Adventure, p. 49
53 Machen, Things Near and Far, London: Martin Secker, 1923, pp. 62–3
54 Machen, Things Near and Far, p. 63
55 Machen, The London Adventure, p. 141
56 Machen, Things Near and Far, p. 59
57 Machen, The London Adventure, p. 141
58 Machen was certainly familiar with the figure of the flâneur, as he reveals in the following extract from his novella A Fragment of Life (1906): ‘And he reflected with sorrow on the innumerable evenings on which he had rejected his landlady’s plain fried chop, and had gone out to flaner among the Italian restaurants in Upper Street, Islington.’ Arthur Machen, ‘A Fragment of Life’, in The Collected Arthur Machen, ed. by Christopher Palmer, London: Duckworth, 1988, 23–88, p. 36
59 A view of Machen endorsed by Philip Van Doren Stern, who was to write: ‘He seems never to have fitted into the life of the huge metropolis. He explored London endlessly and came to know it well, but it evidently terrified him.’ Arthur Machen, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. by Philip Van Doren Stern, London: Richards Press, 1949, Introduction, p. ix
60 Arthur Machen, ‘The Re-Discovery of London’ (1914) in The Secret of the Sangraal and Other Writings, p. 80