After the Enclosure Acts, there was very much an element of necessity, and of transgression around the entire subject of walking. In centuries past, only the wealthy middle and upper classes could undertake the sorts of tours that everyone now takes for granted. Poor people stayed close to their own communities and were often legally obliged to do so. In the seventeenth century one needed a licence to walk to another village in search of work or lodgings. Even then, there were those who looked upon even the more genteel class of walkers with a combination of distrust and horror. In 1793, German writer Karl Philipp Moritz was staying with a friend in Richmond, Surrey. He announced his intention to walk to Oxford. His friend was ‘greatly astonished’. Nonetheless, Moritz set off. Just a couple of miles in, while enquiring if he was going in the right direction for Oxford, he was told ‘you’ll want a carriage to get you there.’ Undaunted, he struck off on a ‘fine broad road’ into the countryside, bordered with ‘lovely green hedges’. But as the miles wore on, he found that every passing coachman was asking if he wanted a lift on the outside of their vehicle, and every farm-worker he passed looked at him in puzzlement. On top of this, he added: ‘When I passed through a village, the old women in their bewilderment would let out a “God almighty!”’
There is a similar distrust and impatience on show in Dickens’ 1841 novel The Old Curiosity Shop when saintly Little Nell and her grandfather are compelled to flee London to escape the nightmarish demands of Daniel Quilp upon the pair of them. Initially, it seems to both Nell and the narrator that away from the London stews and the vice lies a bucolic world of innocence and ease, which they will find even though they are travelling on foot. This illusion of yearning immediately dissipates. The little girl and her kleptomaniac grandfather walk across much of England, fleeing from parish to parish, through nightmare industrial landscapes, meeting various colourful characters, and an increasing amount of peril. As the novel – and their walk – progresses, its lethal nature becomes ever more apparent:
The child walked with more difficulty than she had led her companion to expect, for the pains that racked her joints were of no common severity, and every exertion increased them. But they wrung from her no complaint, or look of suffering; and though the two travellers proceeded very slowly, they did proceed.
Even though they find sanctuary in the end with a kindly schoolmaster in a small village, it is all too late for Little Nell. The walk has broken her. Her journey must soon come to its end. This is an extreme example, but for an author who was himself so enthusiastic about walking, he has the activity often spelling great hardship for his characters. There is Oliver Twist, on the run from the funeral parlour and the Beadle, on his way to London, almost starving in the process. There is Nicholas Nickleby and crippled Smike, struggling their way across the wintry wastes of the Yorkshire moors. David Copperfield features a harrowing journey when the young boy David takes it upon himself to walk from London to Dover, a journey of about seventy miles. Along the way, he is swindled, threatened, and gradually has to sell off his clothes to rascally second-hand traders in order to pay for food. His feet are sore with the unaccustomed exercise, his face is white with chalk, his hair dusty and tangled; he is forced to sleep beneath the stars. Worse yet, though, are his fellow pedestrians. We are left in no doubt that among the lower classes, walking is not merely a token of great poverty, but also the last redoubt of the low-down drunken bully.
Things are different for Victorian literature’s country folk, but even then, long epic walks tend to mirror quite vivid physical and emotional states. In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, walking is the natural mode of transport in places such as the Vale of Blackmoor. Indeed, in the summer months, it is seen as a source of pleasure: witness Angel Clare and his priggish brothers, on their ‘walking tour’ of Wessex. But it is also a token of privation; and later, when Angel Clare has left his wife Tess, and she proves too proud to apply to his family for funding, she is obliged to walk the countryside in search of scarce winter work:
There was something of the habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on – disconnecting herself by little from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity … Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise; a grey serge cape, a red woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whitey brown rough wrapper, and buff-leather gloves. Every thread of that old attire has become faded and thin under the stroke of raindrops, the burn of sunbeams, and the stress of winds.
Rather like Little Nell, Tess in the end is forced to escape on foot. Having murdered Alec, the man who raped her, and having caught up with her estranged husband Angel, the two of them (ignoring the modern railway) simply walk away from the town of Sandbourne (Bournemouth) and into the New Forest. There is a sense of disengagement about this walk; that both of them are plunged too deep into shock to properly register where they might be going. They are walkers in a trance. Many miles into this woodland, they find an empty, secluded house. But this fairy-tale sanctuary – where they achieve their long-delayed consummation – cannot last and, once again, they are forced to move on, this time in the middle of the night:
Though the sky was dense with cloud, a diffused light from some fragment of a moon had hitherto helped them a little. But the moon had now sunk, the clouds seemed to settle almost on their heads, and the night grew as dark as a cave. However, they found their way along, keeping as much on the turf as possible that their tread might not resound, which it was easy to do, there being no hedge or fence of any kind. All around was open loneliness and black solitude, over which a stiff breeze blew.
They are on Salisbury Plain. And it is here that Angel and Tess find themselves at a moonless Stonehenge, the wind causing the ancient heathen monument to ‘hum’. Tess lies upon the sacrificial stone to rest, and falls asleep there. This has been her final walk. This sort of compulsive walking, the automaton trudge as the mind slips its moorings, is found in the writings of the poet John Clare and his The Journey from Essex (1841). This searingly sad journal charts his escape from a lunatic asylum (or ‘mad house’, as he terms it) in Epping Forest, and his subsequent walk all the way up the North Road to Northamptonshire to be reunited with a wife that he refuses to believe is dead.
This journey augurs badly when he takes a wrong turning, seemingly towards London; but then he is on the right road, ‘where it was all plain sailing and steering ahead, meeting no enemy and fearing none.’ He spends the night in a shed near Stevenage in which he is tormented by an ‘uneasy’ dream. The next day’s walk finds Clare growing weaker through lack of food and drink: ‘a Man passed me on horseback in a Slop frock and said “here’s another of the broken down haymakers” and threw me a penny to get a half pint of beer which I picked up and thanked him for.’ Clare observes ‘I seemed to pass the Milestones very quick in the morning – but toward night they seemed to be stretched further asunder.’ By the time he is progressing through Bedfordshire, his hunger is growing worse, as indeed is his physical condition. ‘So I went on hopping with a crippled foot for the gravel had got into my old shoes one of which had now nearly lost the sole.’ Shelter seems elusive, despite various parsons and passers-by attempting to help with directions to barns and sheds. ‘It now began to grow dark apace and the odd houses on the road began to light up and show the inside tenants lots very comfortable, and my outside lot very uncomfortable and wretched.’
But it gets progressively more wretched, so much so that ‘I was very often half asleep as I went. On the third day I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the road side which seemed to taste something like bread. I was hungry and eat heartily till I was satisfied.’ There are those who observe him with something like pity: a gypsy woman who warns him that he ‘will be noticed’; a young woman and an old relative who argue over whether he is ‘shamming’ or not and former neighbours from Helpston passing by on a cart who help him out with fivepence, enough to stop off at an inn for bread, cheese and beer. By now, ‘my feet was more crippled than ever and I could scarcely make a walk of it over the stones and being half ashamed to sit down in the street, I forced to keep on the move.’
Thus, agonisingly, he finally reaches his destination of Northborough. Journeys end, but lovers do not meet. ‘Mary was not there neither could I get any information about her further then the old story of her being dead six years ago.’ The walk has ended with the deranged