I find myself wandering through silvery mist at the top of a wooded hill, admiring the thickness of the silence, and the darkness of the cover of the oaks, and the mysterious low shapes of the old sprawling yews. I have to take all my own shallow prejudices back. After all, I am only a mile and a half outside Dorking and just a few miles from Gatwick – yet there is a subtle splendour in the quietness of this country. As for gentler walks, in the early nineteenth century, before Victoria reached the throne, Jane Austen practically turned southern counties roaming into a sub-genre of literature.
In all of Austen’s novels, characters walk, and each walk always carries its own significance. Sometimes it will be triggered by a banal reason – a carriage is not available at a particular moment, say; but the walk that follows either carries emotional or symbolic resonance. Be it an act of social defiance, or a response to a moment of romantic crisis, the gentle paths and fields and hills are as delicately and closely suggested as the figures that move across them. And it is broadly the pastures and meadows of the southern counties that Austen’s characters walk about in. In Emma, we often find Mr Knightley striding from his house; even Mr Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, sometimes ventures out on foot, as opposed to horseback. Walking is frequently indicative of mood; there are times of upset when an Austen heroine wishes to walk alone and refuses a companion. For these heroines, the very act of walking itself can be taken as an assertion of independence: the exercise is sometimes cathartic. At other times, as in Emma, it is distinctly pleasurable and the company stimulating:
As a walking companion, Emma had very early foreseen how useful she might find [Harriet Smith] … Her father never went beyond the shrubbery, where two divisions of the ground sufficed him for his long walk, or his short, as the year varied; and since Mrs Weston’s marriage, her exercise too had been too much confined. She had ventured once alone to Randalls, but it was not pleasant; and a Harriet Smith, therefore, one whom she could summon at any time to a walk, would be a valuable addition to her privileges.
These days, walkers are enticed into sampling ‘Jane Austen country’, following trails that wind around Chawton in the county of Hampshire, where she lived so long. A little more vigorous is the walk up to the scene of one of Austen’s most famous passages from Emma. A party ascends Box Hill for a picnic. Emma Woodhouse humiliates Miss Bates and is roundly picked up on this by Mr Knightley. Distress and embarrassment are signalled by members of the party detaching and going for their own small walks atop the Downs. For Emma herself, she ends up wanting to be ‘sitting almost alone, and quite unattended to, in observation of the tranquil views beneath her.’
There are other walking crises to be found in Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is accused of ‘conceited independence’ when she undertakes a mighty 3-mile crosscountry walk to visit her ill sister.
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.
The accuser, Miss Bingley, also wonders what effect such an expedition might have upon Mr Darcy. It is clear that one unspoken source of her discomfort with the idea is that Elizabeth has done something quite improper; that there is a forwardness about a young women walking such a distance out in the open all on her own. In fact, Miss Bennet is such a keen walker that when, at one stage in the novel, a proposed tour to the Lake District is altered to a journey to Derbyshire instead, she vents her irritation loudly. The pursuit of recreational walking seemed to have become part of genteel ‘English culture and comfort’ about a century before Austen’s fiction. In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote, in Journal To Stella:
I have always been plying you to walk and read. The young fellows have begun a kind of fashion to walk, and many of them have got swinging strong shoes on purpose; it has got as far as several young lords; if it hold, it would be a very good thing.
Young lords and gentlewomen were obviously not alone in their sensibilities; by the middle years of the nineteenth century, pleasant prospects were sought out by increasing numbers of highly organised rambling groups from a wide array of social and professional backgrounds. There was an element, for ordinary working people, rather lower on the social scale than Austen’s heroines, of raising themselves up. Walking became not just about fresh air; there was also an element of virtue, and sober fellowship, and education. In the industrial towns at this time, there had been a huge rise in entertainments such as the music hall and the public house. Walking groups were being founded to stand deliberately apart from the noise and vulgarity of such pursuits.
Many of these walking clubs had a distinctly Methodist or Non-Conformist flavour; some were organised directly by churches. For instance, in the Lancashire mill towns, a Saturday half-day holiday was established in the mid-nineteenth century so that workers now had that afternoon for leisure. A great number of churches – many of them congregationalist – leapt in to try and ensure that this time would not be ‘wasted’ on drink or other such ‘worthless’ recreations. Rambling expeditions were proposed instead. A number of temperance associations also encouraged group walks out into the country.
There were other associations such as the Ancoats Brotherhood, based in Lancashire and formed by Charles Rowley, the founder of the Sunday Recreation Movement. In part, the group was about ‘rambling with a bevy of chums’ in places as far away as Wales. The group would also attract impressive guest speakers, such as William Morris and Ford Madox Brown.1 The act of walking in such organised groups was a very different thing to the solitary, dreamy rambles of the Romantic movement. This was about urban dwellers roaming about the crags and the moors and the coniferous woodlands as a deliberate means of breaking out of the work–recreation patterns that were being laid down for them.
There was a strong element of self-improvement; the working man who took a lively interest in the world around him, in the paths beneath his feet, had a greater claim towards shaping that world. Such walking groups were keenly interested in ideas to do with the spread of democracy. Early industrialisation, with its remorseless demands of time and energy of its workers, could also have the side effect of infantilising them. Walking out on to the Cheshire Plains, or into the vales of North Wales, on the other hand, gave those workers the sense of a certain independence of movement and of thought.
One of the most inspirational and pivotal figures in the walking movement, G. H. B. Ward, formed the Sheffield Clarion Rambling Club at the turn of the twentieth century. He was an engineer at the Hecla works, and an active Labour Party man. Indeed, as the years went on, he would rise to become a senior Labour figure. But it is his passion for walking that is remembered today. The explicit aim of the Clarion Club was the mental and physical improvement of the working man. Interestingly, the Club also posed an explicit challenge to the church; and that was over the use of the Sabbath. According to G. H. B. Ward, Sundays would be more satisfyingly spent out in the refreshing air. On this point, the Sheffield ramblers, and a small club of middle-class intellectuals down south, intriguingly mirrored one another. For as the walking movement grew – and despite the best efforts of the churches to get involved – it was also clear that it had a certain cerebral and secular appeal to many. There were also those who went out rambling on Sunday mornings precisely in order to get away from the church and its influence.
This corner of Jane Austen-land – that is, the countryside clustered around Box Hill and Leith Hill – was also deeply favoured by key members of the Victorian rambling group the Sunday Tramps. The ‘Tramps’ were a small and perhaps rather self-conscious assembly of intellectuals, scientists, writers and naturalists. They started meeting in 1879, led by Sir Leslie Stephen, a formidable Cambridge intellectual, editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, and enthusiastic mountaineer, among other things.
In this club, the men – there were no women – got out of London on Sunday to go for rather austere, brisk 25-mile walks. The fact that they missed church was all part of it. These men wanted to escape the ‘dreary Sabbath’ in London. Sir Leslie Stephen revelled in his ‘flock of cranium tramps’