A History of Britain, Volume 3 Read Free Page A

Indo-Scottish
saddhu
, a holy walker, making his way through the sub-continent, across the Arabian desert and finally home via France and Spain. Before he set off again for Vienna and then the United States and Canada, ‘Walking’ Stewart became a minor celebrity – a fixture at Romantic suppers, and pointed out in St James’s Park. The writer Thomas De Quincey, who knew him, was also in no doubt of the levelling implications of walking. When he calculated (a little dubiously) that William Wordsworth must have walked 185,000 miles, the figure was meant to advertise the poet’s moral credentials – his down-to-earth understanding of ordinary people and places. At the height of the revolutionary crisis in France in 1793, during the reign of Terror, John Thelwall, the son of an impoverished silk mercer, who had become a radical lecturer and orator, would publish his eccentric verse and prose narrative of a walk around London and Kent, entitled
The Peripatetic
(1793) – a footsore glimpse of the lowly and the mighty.
    Not everyone was ready for the sight of ‘men of taste’ taking to the roads. The first guide expressly written for the ‘rambler’ in the Lakes, complete with information on footpaths, and carrying the revolutionary implication that the landscape across which they tracked was a common patrimony (and not just the resort of beggars and footpads), would not appear until 1792. Some 10 years earlier, when the German pastor Karl Moritz walked through southern England and the Midlands, he was constantly greeted with suspicion and disbelief. His host at Richmond ‘could not sufficiently express his surprise’ at Moritz’s determination to walk to Oxford ‘and still further’ and when, on a June day, he became tired and sat down in the shade of a hedgerow to read his Milton, ‘those who rode, or drove, past me, stared at me with astonishment, and made many significant gestures, as if they thought my head deranged’. The landlord of the Mitre at Oxford and his family made sure he had the clean linen that befitted a gentleman, but were bemused by his determination to walk. Had he not arrived in polite company, they admitted, he would never have been allowed across the threshold since ‘any person undertaking so long a journey on foot, is sure to be looked upon … as either a beggar, or a vagabond, or … a rogue’.
    Moritz presented himself as an innocent foreigner in a country evidently mad for speed, its citizens hurtling along the turnpike roads in carriages and on horses. Yet he also knew that walking made him, if not a democrat, then someone who openly and perversely rejoiced in his indifference to rank. It brought him into direct contact with the salt of the earth: a female chimney sweep and a philosophical saddler who recites Homer: the academy of the road. And it showed off the pedestrian as a new kind of man, a Man of Feeling. In that same year, 1782, he would finally have been able to get his hands on the work that rapidly became the Bible of thoughtful pedestrians, the
Confessions
(1782) of the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and, as an appendix, the
Reveries of the Solitary Walker
, 10 disquisitions each in the form of a walk.
    For Rousseau, a walk had always been away from, as much as towards, something. The
Confessions
– made available to the public through the good offices of an English friend and devotee, Brooke Boothby – recorded his first decisive illumination as he walked from Paris to Vincennes to see his then friend, the writer and philosopher Denis Diderot. Somewhere along that road it dawned on Rousseau, as he walked away from the city, that the entire values of the polite world were upside down. He had been taught to assume that progress consisted of a journey from nature to civilization, when that transformation had, in fact, been a terrible fall. Nature decreed equality; culture manufactured inequality. So liberty and happiness consisted not in replacing