Wanderlust: A History of Walking (15 page)

Not everyone was ready to accept the landscape garden as realized by Brown. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, wrote, “Gardening, as far as Gardening is an Art, or entitled to the appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then no longer be a garden.” Reynolds was onto something. The garden, in the course of becoming more and more indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape, had become
unnecessary—Walpole had said of the landscape architect William Kent that he had “leapt the fence and saw all nature was a garden.” If a garden was nothing more than a visually pleasing space in which to wander, then gardens could be found rather than made, and the tradition of the garden walk could expand to become the tourist's excursion. Rather than looking at the work of man, the scenic stroller could look at the works of nature, and to look at nature as a work of art completed a momentous revolution. In Shaftesbury's terms, princely gardens had finally given way to wilderness; the nonhuman world had become a fit subject for aesthetic contemplation.

The aristocratic garden had begun as part of the fortified castle, and slowly its boundaries had melted away; the melting of the garden into the world is a mark of how much safer England had become (and to a lesser degree, much of western Europe, where the fashion for the English garden soon caught on). Since about 1770, England had undergone a “transportation revolution” of improved roads, decreased roadside crime, and cheaper fares. The very nature of travel changed. Before the mid-eighteenth century, travel accounts have little to say about the land between religious or cultural landmarks. Afterward, an entirely new way of travel arose. In pilgrimage and practical travel, the space between home and destination had been an inconvenience or an ordeal. When this space became scenery, travel became an end in itself, an expansion of the garden stroll. That is to say, the experiences along the way could replace destinations as the purpose of travel. And if the whole landscape was the destination, one arrived as soon as one set out in this world that could be looked at as a garden or a painting. Walking had long been recreational, but travel had joined it, and it was only a matter of time before traveling on foot would itself become a widespread part of the pleasures of scenic travel, its slowness finally a virtue. The point at which a poor poet and his sister might travel across a snowy countryside for the pleasure of looking and walking was drawing near.

Afterward, Wordsworth himself was moved to write a guidebook to the Lake District, in which he summarized the history traced here. “Within the last sixty years,” he wrote in 1810, “a practice, denominated Ornamental Gardening, was at that time becoming prevalent over England. In union with an admiration of this art, and in some instances in opposition to it, had been generated a relish for select parts of natural scenery: and Travellers, instead of confining their
observations to Towns, Manufactories, or Mines, began (a thing till then unheard of) to wander over the island in search of sequestered spots, distinguished . . . for the sublimity or beauty of the forms of Nature there to be seen.”

The unhappy German traveler Carl Moritz, who felt rejected at many points on his pedestrian journey, in fact encountered a plethora of walkers, though neither he nor his modern readers made much of them. He takes little note of the many people he saw walking from Greenwich to London, but he does say of London's St. James's Park that what “greatly compensates for the mediocrity of this park, is the astonishing number of people who, towards evening, in fine weather, resort here; our finest walks are never so full even in the midst of summer. The exquisite pleasure of mixing freely with such a concourse of people, who are for the most part well dressed and handsome, I have experienced this evening for the first time.” Moritz, in fact, is suggesting that walking is
more
genteel a pastime, or more public a genteel pastime, in England than in Germany, even if traveling on foot is not (he is also revealing that he is a snob, which may be why he resented road-walking's plebeian status). During his time in London, he also visited Ranelagh and Vauxhall Gardens. Cousins of the country fair and the modern amusement park, these popular sites offered music, spectacles, strolls, and refreshments in a garden atmosphere, and both the gentry and the middle class flocked there for evening amusements. Like modern strollers in Latin American plazas and parks or any carnival or mall now, they were there to look at each other as well as the scenery, and the scenery was often augmented with orchestras, pantomimes, refreshments, and other diversions. Social promenading was another aspect of a thriving culture of walking, whose more solitary moments developed in the private garden and park. “The People of London are as fond of walking as our friends at Pekin of riding,” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in the guise of a Chinese visitor describing Vauxhall. “One of the principal entertainments of the citizens here in summer is to repair about nightfall to a garden not far from town, where they walk about, shew their best cloaths and best faces, and listen to a concert provided for the occasion.”

Another significant aspect of Moritz's travels was his visit to the famous
cavern in the Peak District of Derbyshire in northern England, not far from the Lakes. Significantly, there was already a guide in place to collect a fee and show him its marvels. Scenic tourism was coming into existence in the Peak District, the Lake District, Wales, and Scotland. And just as the development of the English landscape garden had been surrounded by a flurry of descriptive poems and epistles, so the growth of tourism was encouraged and informed by guidebooks. Like modern guidebooks and travel narratives, these tell of what is to be seen and where to find it. Some of them—notably the work of the clergyman William Gilpin—also tell
how
to see. A taste for landscape was a sign of refinement, and those wishing to become refined took instruction in landscape connoisseurship. One suspects that the contemporaries who made Gilpin so influential a writer consulted him much the way later generations consulted guides on which fork to use or how to thank a hostess, for Gilpin wrote when the middle class was acquiring the hitherto aristocratic taste for landscape. A landscape garden was a luxury that only a few could create or use, but the unaltered landscape was available to virtually everyone, and more and more middle-class people could travel to enjoy it as the roads became safer and smoother and transportation became cheaper. A taste for landscape was something to be learned, and Gilpin was many people's guide.

“She would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree,” remarks Edward of the romantic Marianne in Jane Austen's
Sense and Sensibility.
Critic John Barrell writes that “there is a sense in which, in late eighteenth-century England, one can say that the simple contemplation of landscape, quite apart from its expression in painting, writing or whatever, came to be regarded as an important pursuit for the cultivated and almost in itself the practice of an art. To display a correct taste in landscape was a valuable social accomplishment quite as much as to sing well, or to compose a polite letter. The heroines of a number of late eighteenth-century novels are made to display this taste with an almost ostentatious virtuosity, and not only the simple fact of having a taste for landscape or not, but also variations of taste within the general one, are regarded by some novelists as legitimate indications of differences in character.” Marianne Dashwood is asserting her romanticism with her taste for old twisted trees, though she apologizes for the fashionability of the taste: “It is very true . . . that admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined
what picturesque beauty was.” She too is speaking of Gilpin, who brought into common usage the word
picturesque,
which originally meant any landscape that resembled or could be perceived as a picture and eventually came to mean a wild, gnarled, rough, intricate kind of landscape.

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

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

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

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

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