The Sunday Tramps were by no means unique in finding the Sabbath dreary. Though our image of Victorians is that of respectable, upright families, occupying the church pews without fail, the truth was more complex, especially towards the end of that century. In rural parishes, and certain parts of Scotland, there was practically no escape from the Sunday service, simply because in a small community, any absence from the rituals of any particular day would be extremely noticeable. By contrast, in the vast sprawling towns, parish priests had a far more difficult job. In the poorer districts, the community was transient – families moving in or moving out according to the fluctuations in their economic circumstances. Among a number of the intellectual middle-classes – mostly educated men, who had read Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology – the church no longer had any real grip.
According to historian A. N. Wilson, had the Victorian middle classes thought to seek out the opinions of the urban working classes on the subject of the church and its teachings, ‘they would have found religious practice (except among Irish immigrants) all but unknown, and indifference to religious ideas all but total.’ One contemporary observer noted that in ‘the alleys of London … the Gospel is as unknown as in Tibet.’3
It is not quite as if the Sunday Tramps were dedicated atheists; they simply looked at the dull city, which was sullen and silent apart from church bells. The shops were all shut, the factories were still, and the Tramps took that opportunity to worship the beauty of Home Counties countryside instead. They charged across those small green fields, pointed themselves towards the startlingly abrupt hills of the South Downs, and took in the neatly proportioned prospects of downland and meadow. In In Praise of Walking, Leslie Stephen is especially clear on the pleasure of temporarily shaking off the capital, escaping its ‘vast octopus arms’ and mapping a course ‘between the great lines of railway’. The benefits were almost instantaneous; in counties such as Surrey and Kent, the old rural ways still held hard, and there was great hospitality to be found in even the most humble cottages. In many ways, Stephen was as great a romantic as Wordsworth, though he laid claims to being rather less sentimental. When once writing about the Lake District, he declared: ‘Much as I respect Wordsworth, I don’t care to see the cottage in which he lived.’
Another of the prominent Sunday Tramps, the novelist George Meredith, lived in a house on the side of Box Hill, and his enthusiasm for exploring the surrounding countryside was undinted. His 1885 novel Diana of the Crossways contained evocative hymns of praise to the downland: ‘Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of service-tree or the white-beam, spotted the semi-circle of swelling green down, black and silver.’
Stephen and his assorted followers were not dreamers; this was walking as a highly masculine – and, in some curious way, acutely Victorian – activity; they marched across the land as though they claimed it for their own, in the true Imperial manner. In his obituary of Stephen, George Meredith paid this tribute, recalling the boisterous energy and enthusiasm of these Sunday Home Counties hikes:
A pause … came at the examination of the leader’s watch and Ordnance map under the western sun, and void was given for the strike across country to catch the tail of a train offering dinner in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, over ditches and fellows, past proclamation against trespassers, under suspicion of being taken for more serious depredators in flight.
The chief of the Tramps had a wonderful calculating eye in the observation of distances and the nature of the land as he proved by his discovery of untried passes in the higher Alps, and he had no mercy for pursy followers. I have often said of this life-long student and philosophical head that he had in him the making of a great military captain.
The mere fact of a ‘no trespassing’ sign had always been enough to pique Stephen, and goad him into doing that very thing. He wrote:
I looked out for signs saying trespassers will be prosecuted … That gave a strong presumption that the trespass must have some attraction. Cyclists could only reflect that trespassing for them is not only forbidden but impossible. To me it was a reminder of the many delicious bits of walking which, even in the neighbourhood of London, await the man who has no superstitious reverence for legal rights.
There speaks the true vigorous Victorian. Although his near contemporary A. H. Sidgwick, who published his Walking Essays in 1912, had this to say on the subject:
There is a definite type of walker who loves trespassing for its own sake, and exults, as he climbs a fence or turns up a path marked ‘private’, in a vision of the landed aristocracy of England defied and impotent … There is much excuse for this attitude: as we review the history of English commons and rights of way, of the organised piracy of the body politic and the organised perjury which supported it, it is difficult to stifle an impulse to throw at least one pebble … at the head of Goliath.
He added with a semi-humorous shake of his head, ‘To indulge the love of trespassing involves ultimately making trespassing an end rather than a means, and this – like the twin passion for short-cuts as an end in themselves – is disastrous to walking.’4 Sidgwick’s view was that no matter how unjust the circumstances of its creation, the fact was that the enclosed English countryside was also, paradoxically, the thing of beauty that the walker admired so, and that fulminating against the landed aristocracy could only leach pleasure away from any walk. Added to this, it has always been rather easier for the patrician middle classes to trespass simply because, if confronted, they could sound eminently reasonable in perfectly modulated tones of Received Pronunciation.
Over 100 years on, the territory of these Sunday Tramps would now give Stephen little of that ‘delicious’ sense, though. Box Hill and Leith Hill are now firmly National Trust territory. What would either Leslie Stephen or indeed Emma Woodhouse make of it now? And so off I stride, out of Dorking station – and thanks to my airy dismissal of maps, I inevitably, immediately, take a wrong turning. As a result of my mistake, the next rather stressful thirty minutes involve following a busy road running along the base of Box Hill, heading towards Reigate. Walking along, I look yearningly up at those thick woods on the steep slopes – but without seeing any hint of public footpaths or indeed any particularly promising field I can simply trot across. In the meantime, my attempted Jane Austen-esque promenade has suddenly narrowed into a flinching, shrinking-back-from-vast-delivery-lorries ordeal. If I resemble any Austen figure at this moment, it is probably the oleaginous, cringing vicar Mr Elton.
What might have ended with a frustrated about turn – is there anything worse than having to go back the same way, over unlovely territory? – thankfully culminates in a side road, marked as a dead end. Following this a little way, past the eerie howling of a combined kennel-cattery, and just a quarter of a mile on, you are in business. I find a right hand turn, with a lane leading directly up the hill. When you are directly beneath it, the hill looks absurdly steep.
The lane soon gives way to some discreet National Trust signage. What previously looked steep, actually becomes steep. This lovely wooded path, slightly wet with the spring mist, moist flint-stone and mud, angles upwards through a tunnel of old trees. The cover is so dense that there is no possibility of looking out at the view – just a fairly solid climb. It doesn’t last long, you are at the top surprisingly quickly. Now you can see the prospect before you. Except, that is, on the day I have chosen to climb. I can’t see anything. There is a delicate yet impenetrable mist all around, and the Mole Valley beneath is a gauzy haze. It is not that disappointing; any views at all – from anywhere – offer at best a certain amount of limited novelty. This one, down to the river, over to the trees on the other side of the valley, would have been pretty enough, yet I know it would not have detained me for long. With hills and country such as this, there are other things. There are breathtakingly beautiful trees to be seen on this plateau. Oaks so nobbled that the trunks look as though they contain a multitude of faces. Box Hill, incidentally, is so called because of its profusion of box trees on its slopes and summit.
Thence to Emma Woodhouse’s picnic site. Back then, parties would have been taken up the hill by carriage via a zigzagging