Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Revised)

This is a cultural history of walking in nineteenth-century England, assessing its importance in literature and in culture. Re-reading Wordsworth in the context of contemporary changes in transportation, agriculture, and aesthetics, Anne Wallace articulates a previously unrecognized literary mode–peripatetic. Her discussions of eighteenth-century approaches to peripatetic and of John Clare’s representations of walking as pastoral trace an itinerary through its varied uses in Victorian literature, notably in the work of Barrett Browning, Dickens, and Hardy. Increasingly frequent disappointment of peripatetic expectations reflects growing doubt about the writer’s and the reader’s ability to counter the disconnective tendencies of technology. The book represents a major contribution to the ongoing debates regarding rural English literature in which the author demonstrates how a proper understanding of peripatetic significantly enriches our assessment of a text’s standpoint on key issues, including industrialization, class, and mobility.