Wanderlust: A History of Walking (44 page)

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“A traveller on foot”: Carl Moritz,
Travels of Carl Philipp Moritz in England in 1782: A Reprint of the English Translation of 1795,
with an introduction by E. Matheson (1795; reprint, London: Humphrey Milford, 1924), 37.

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“I walked with my brother at my side”: Dorothy Wordsworth, quoted in Hunter Davies,
William Wordsworth: A Biography
(New York: Antheneum, 1980), 70.

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“I cannot pass unnoticed”: Dorothy Wordsworth to her proud aunt Crackanthorp, April 21, 1794, cited in de Selincourt,
Letters,
117.

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“When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods”: Thoreau, “Walking,” 98–99.

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The eighteenth century created a taste for nature: See Christopher Thacker,
The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 1–2. He writes, “Aristotle claimed that all poetry was ‘the imitation of men in action.' By poetry, he implied all forms of art, from sculpture to drama, from epic poetry to history, to painting and even to music. . . . Aristotle's definition of the scope of poetry cuts out many matters which we might consider wholly proper, indeed desirable, as the subject of a work of art. Above all, the depiction of ‘nature' is a subject which we, living two centuries after the romantic explosion at the end of the eighteenth century, have come to accept almost without thinking.” Naming many landscape paintings, Thacker goes on to say that such subject matter would have seemed incomprehensible, or at least inconsequential, to Aristotle and indeed to any educated onlooker before the transformation of perception that “took place in western Europe in the eighteenth century.”

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“Sixteenth-century doctors stressed”: Mark Girouard,
Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 100.

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Queen Elizabeth added a raised terrace: Susan Lasdun,
The English Park: Royal, Private & Public
(New York: Vendome Press, 1992), 35.

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“There is gravel walks and grass and close walks”: Celia Fiennes on the gardens at Agnes Burton,
The Journeys of Celia Fiennes,
ed. Christopher Morris (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 90–91.

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“These avenues provided the shade and shelter for walks”: Lasdun,
English Park,
66.

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“O glorious Nature!”: Shaftesbury in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis,
The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620–1840
(New York: Harper, 1975), 122; also a key text in Thacker,
The Wildness Pleases,
whose title comes from this effusion.

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“Poetry, Painting, and Gardening”: Walpole, quoted in Hunt and Willis,
Genius of the Place,
11.

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“asked to be explored”: John Dixon Hunt,
The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 143.

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“Whereas the French formal garden was based on a single axial view”: Carolyn Bermingham,
Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 12.

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“into harmony with the age's humanism”: Christopher Hussey,
English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700–1750
(London: Country Life, 1967), 101.

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“Within thirty years”:
Stowe Landscape Gardens
(Great Britain: National Trust, 1997), 45.

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“O lead me to the wide-extended walks”: James Thomson,
The Seasons
(Edinburgh and New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1860), 139. Kenneth Johnston, in
The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy
(New York: Norton, 1998), calls
The Seasons
the most successful poem of the century, and Andrew Wilton in
Turner and the Sublime
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) documents its impact.

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“Everyone takes a different way”: Pope, letter of 1739, cited in
Stowe Landscape Gardens,
66.

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“or drove about it in cabriolets”: Walpole, letter to George Montagu, July 7, 1770, in
Selected Letters of Horace Walpole
(London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1926), 93.

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“Gardening, as far as Gardening is an Art”: Sir Joshua Reynolds, quoted in Hunt and Willis,
Genius of the Place,
32.

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“leapt the fence”: Walpole, quoted in Hunt and Willis,
Genius of the Place,
13.

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“Within the last sixty years”: Wordsworth,
Guide to the Lakes,
ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 69.

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“greatly compensates for the mediocrity of this park”:
Travels of Carl Philipp Moritz,
44.

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“The People of London are as fond of walking”: Oliver Goldsmith,
The Citizen of the World,
vol. 2 of the
Collected Works,
ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 293.

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“how to admire an old twisted tree”: Jane Austen,
Sense and Sensibility
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1961), 80.

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“there is a sense in which”: John Barrell,
The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 4–5.

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“It is very true”: Austen,
Sense and Sensibility,
83–84.

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“Were it not for this general deficiency of objects”: William Gilpin,
Observations on Several Parts of Great Britain, particularly the Highlands of Scotland, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1776
(London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), 2:119.

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“Let us learn, in real scenes, to trace”: Richard Payne Knight, “The Landscape: A Didactic Poem,” in
The Genius of the Place,
344.

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“Thomas Gray's celebrated Lake District tour”: Gray wrote about it in his “Journal in the Lakes,” in
The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse,
vol. 1, ed. Edmund Gosse (New York: Macmillan, 1902).

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“They were country ladies”: Dorothy Wordsworth, Oct. 16, 1792, in de Selincourt,
Letters,
84.

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“That she should have walked three miles”: Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice
(Oxford: Oxford University Press/Avenal Books, 1985), 30; “At that moment they were met,” 49; “Her figure was elegant,” 52; “Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness,” 340; “favourite walk,” 164; “More than once did Elizabeth in her ramble,” 176; “had never seen a place for which nature had done more,” 234;
“rapturously cried, ‘what delight! what felicity!,” 150; “it is not the object of this work,” 232; “ ‘My dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?,' ” 360.

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“In the morning, I read Mr Knight's
Landscape
”: July 27, 1800, reprinted in
Home at Grasmere: Extracts from the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth and from the Poems of William Wordsworth,
ed. Colette Clark (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1978), 53–54.

 

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“His legs were pointedly condemned”: Thomas De Quincey,
Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets,
ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970), 53–54.

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“Happy in this, that I with nature walked”: William Wordsworth,
The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850),
ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1995), 322. All quotes are from the 1805 version.

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“He sees nothing but himself and the universe”: Hazlitt, “The Lake School,” in
William Hazlitt: Selected Writings
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970), 218.

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“more glorious than I had ever beheld”: Wordsworth,
Prelude,
158.

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“Should the guide I choose”: Ibid., 36.

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“With this act of disobedience”: Johnston,
Hidden Wordsworth,
188.

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“standing on top of golden hours”: Wordsworth,
Prelude,
226.

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“each spot of old and recent fame”: Ibid., 348.

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“Oswald had traveled to India”: Johnston,
Hidden Wordsworth,
286.

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“no region, pervious to human feet”: Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart—Edward Irving—William Wordsworth,” in
Literary Reminiscences,
vol. 3 of
The Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey
(Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1880), 597.

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“I have some thoughts:” in de Selincourt,
Letters,
153; and “So like a peasant,” Wordsworth,
Prelude,
42.

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“Throughout that turbulent time”: Basil Willey,
The Eighteenth-Century Background
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 205.

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“that odious class of men called democrats”: Wordsworth, letter to a friend, May 23, 1794, in de Selincourt,
Letters,
119.

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“The principal object, then, proposed in these poems”: Wordsworth, preface to the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads,
in
Anthology of Romanticism,
ed. Ernest Bernbaum (New York: Ronald Press, 1948), 300–301.

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“I love a public road”: Wordsworth,
Prelude,
496.

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“Had I been born in a class”: Johnston,
Hidden Wordsworth,
57.

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“They were surrounded”: Hazlitt, “The Lake School,” 217.

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“He won't a man as said a deal to common fwoak”: Local quoted in
Wordsworth Among the Peasantry of Westmorland,
cited in Davies,
Wordsworth,
322.

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“He would set his head a bit forrad”: Andrew J. Bennett, “ ‘Devious Feet': Wordsworth and the Scandal of Narrative Form,”
LELH
59 (1992): 147.

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“At present he is walking”: Dorothy, in a letter to Lady Beaumont, May 1804, in Davies,
Wordsworth,
166.

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“almost physiological relation” and following: Seamus Heaney, “The Makings of a Music,” in
Preoccupations
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 66, 68.

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“the lord who owned the ground”: Davies,
Wordsworth,
324. See also Wallace,
Walking, Literature and English Culture,
117.

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“The grave old bard”: Letter published in the
Manchester Guardian,
October 7, 1887, cited in Howard Hill,
Freedom to Roam: The Struggle for Access to Britain's Moors and Mountains
(Ashbourne, England: Moorland Publishing, 1980), 40. The presence of a deferential “Mr. Justice Coleridge” on the walk and Sir John Wallace at the confrontation make it appear that this is another version of the same event. Late in life Wordsworth, alas, also opposed the building of a railroad that would take tourists to Windermere, crustily remarking that workers could take their holidays closer to home. Though an unkind remark, it is not altogether wrong about the impact of tourism—a century later the Sierra Club would take the phrase “render accessible” out of its mission statement, realizing that people could love the landscape to death with tourism infrastructures and general trampling.

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“I purpose within a month”: Earle Vonard Weller, ed.,
Autobiography of John Keats, Compiled from his Letters and Essays
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933), 105.

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“I should not have consented”: Keats, in Marples,
Shank's Pony,
68.

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“hunger-bitten girl”: Wordsworth,
Prelude,
374.

 

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“a processional march”: Thomas Hardy,
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
(New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 10.

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“In the neighborhood of latitude”: Aldous Huxley, “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” in
Collected Essays
(New York: Bantam Books, 1960), 1.

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“One of the pleasantest things in the world”: William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey,” in
The Lore of the Wanderer,
ed. Geoffrey Goodchild (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 65.

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“The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread”: Leslie Stephen, “In Praise of Walking,” in Finlay,
Pleasures of Walking,
20.

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“lameness was too severe”: Stephen, “In Praise,” 24.

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“A walking tour should be gone on alone”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Walking Tours,” in Goodchild,
Lore of the Wanderer,
10–11.

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“I have two doctors”: G. M. Trevelyan, “Walking,” in Finlay,
Pleasures of Walking,
57.

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“Whenever I was with friends”: Max Beerbohm, “Going Out on a Walk,” in Finlay,
Pleasures of Walking,
39.

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“I wish to speak a word for Nature” and following: Thoreau, “Walking,” 93–98.

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“The best thing is to walk”: Bruce Chatwin, “It's a Nomad Nomad World,” in
Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969–1989
(New York: Viking, 1996), 103.

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“How womankind, who are confined”: Thoreau, “Walking,” 97.

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“Perhaps walking can be the way to peace”: Mort Malkin, “Walk for Peace,”
Fellowship
(magazine of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship), July/August 1997, 12. Malkin is the author of
Walk—The Pleasure Exercise
and
Walking—The Weight Loss Exercise.