Abstract
During the later eighteenth century, walking ceased to be merely walking and became self-conscious pedestrianism. This tradition is perpetuated today by the Ramblers’ Association and allied organizations. What were, and what continue to be, the pleasures of walking?
I took a walk to day to botanize … the green is covered with daiseys & the little Celadine the hedge bottoms are crowded with the green leaves of the arum were the boy is peeping for pootys with eager anticipations & delight —
John Clare, Natural History Letter IX (25 March 1825)
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Notes
See Landry, ‘Green Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807’, in Anne K. Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum and Jonathan Post, eds, Huntington Library Quarterly (forthcoming). On Dorothy Wordsworth, see Robert Mellin, ‘“Some Other Ground”: Dorothy Wordsworth, the Picturesque, Ecology’, in Michael Branch, ed., Critical Essays in Literature and Environment (Boise: University of Idaho Press, 1998), pp. 81–97. I am grateful to Mellin for lending me this brilliant essay in typescript.
Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 75.
Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’, in P.P. Howe, ed., The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930–34), 8: 181–9; this passage p. 187.
See H. Pederson, Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century: Methods and Results, trans. J.W. Spargo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).
McDonagh, De Quincey’s Disciplines (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 86–7.
Kim Taplin, The English Path (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1979), p. 28.
David McCracken, Wordsworth and the Lake District: A Guide to the Poems and Their Places (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 3.
John Gaze, Figures in a Landscape: A History of The National Trust (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1988), p. 10.
Adrian Phillips, ‘Conservation’, in Howard Newby, ed., The National Trust: The Next Hundred Years (London: The National Trust, 1995), pp. 32–52; this passage p. 32.
W. John Coletta defends Clare’s ecologically grounded figuration as ‘every bit as complex as the transcendental signifiers of a Shelley’ in ‘Ecological Aesthetics and the Natural History Poetry of John Clare’, John Clare Society Journal 14 (July 1995): 29–46; this passage p. 38. See also James C. McKusick’s ‘“A Language that is ever green”: The Ecological Vision of John Clare’, University of Toronto Quarterly 61 (1991): 226–49.
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© 2001 Donna Landry
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Landry, D. (2001). The Pleasures of Perambulation. In: The Invention of the Countryside. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_10
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