To understand his walking, it is important to break away from the idea of “the walk” as meaning a brief stroll about a pleasant place and from that other definition of the recent writers on Romantic walking, of walking as long-distance travel. For Wordsworth walking was a mode not of traveling, but of being. At twenty-one, he set off on a two-thousand-mile journey on foot, but during the last fifty years of his life, he paced back and forth on a small garden terrace to compose his poetry, and both kinds of walking were important to him, as was cruising about the streets of Paris and of London, climbing mountains, and walking with sister and friends. All this walking found a way into his poetry. I could have written about his walking earlier, with the philosophical writers who made walking part of their thinking process, or later, when I turn to the histories of walking in the city. But he himself linked walking with nature, poetry, poverty, and vagrancy in a wholly new and compelling way. And of course Wordsworth himself emphatically valued the rural over the urban:
Happy in this, that I with nature walked
Not having a too early intercourse
With the deformities of crowded life. . . .
Too, he is the figure to which posterity looks in tracing the history of walking in the landscape: he has become a trailside god.
Born in 1770 in Cockermouth, just north of the more wild and steep scenery of the Lake District, Wordsworth liked in later years to portray himself as a simple man born amid a kind of pastoral republic of lakeland freeholders and shepherds. In fact, his father was the agent of Lord Lowther, an immensely wealthy despot who owned much of the region. The future poet was not yet eight when his mother died; Dorothy was sent away to be raised by relatives, and he himself was sent to school in Hawkshead, in the heart of the Lakes. The death of their father when Wordsworth was thirteen left the children dependent on the goodwill of unenthused relations, for Lord Lowther managed to deprive the five Wordsworth children of their legacy from this successful father for nearly twenty years. But the years at Hawkshead’s excellent school were idyllic despite or perhaps because of all the family turmoil. There he set snares, ice-skated, climbed the cliffs for birds’ eggs, boated, and walked incessantly, at night and often in the morning before school, when he and a friend would go the five miles around the nearby lake. Or so says The Prelude, his great autobiographical poem of several thousand lines, which even with its scrambled chronologies and deleted facts provides a spectacular portrait of the poet’s early life. Called by his family “The Poem to Coleridge,” to whom it is addressed, it is also subtitled “The Growth of a Poet’s Mind,” signifying exactly what kind of an autobiography it is, and it was meant to be a prelude to a monumental philosophical poem The Recluse, of which only The Prelude and “The Excursion” were completed.
The Prelude reads almost as a single long walk that, though interrupted, never altogether stops, and this recurrent image of the walker gives it continuity amid all its digressions and detours. One pictures Wordsworth like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress or Dante in the Divine Comedy, a small figure touring the whole world on foot, only this time around it is a world of lakes, dances, dreams, books, friendships, and many many places. The poem is also a kind of atlas of the making of a poet, showing us the role of this city and that mountain, for places loom larger than people. In the same respectfully spiteful vein as De Quincey remarking on Wordsworth’s legs, the essayist William Hazlitt once quipped, “He sees nothing but himself and the universe.” In the history of English literature, the rise of the novel is often linked to the rise of awareness and interest about personal life—personal life as private thoughts, emotions and relations between people. Wordsworth went much further than the novels of his time in charting his own thoughts, emotions, memories, and relations to place, but his seems a curiously impersonal life, since he remains reticent on his personal relationships—thus Hazlitt’s quip.
His passion for walking and for landscape seems to have originated in childhood, or been that curiosity so many children have, salvaged and refined into art in his later years, but the passion begins too early and goes too far to be merely the fashionable taste for admiring and describing landscapes. In the fourth of the Prelude’s thirteen books, he describes walking home from an all-night dance somewhere in the Lakes, sometime in his late teens, to witness a dawn “more glorious than I had ever beheld.” Early on this morning, while “The sea was laughing at a distance; all / The solid mountains were as bright as clouds” he committed to his vocation as poet—“I made no vows but vows / Were then made for me”—and he became a “dedicated spirit. On I walked / In blessedness, which even yet remains.” In his early twenties, he seems to have set about to systematically fail at every alternative to being a poet and chosen wandering and musing as the preliminaries for realizing his vocation.
Should the guide I choose
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way,
he asserts amid the opening lines of this massive poem first finished in 1805, revised repeatedly during his lifetime, and only published after his death in 1850.
The turning point in both his life and The Prelude is his amazing 1790 walk with his fellow student Robert Jones across France into the Alps, when they should have been studying for their Cambridge University exams. Wordsworth’s most recent biographer, Kenneth Johnston, dramatically declares, “With this act of disobedience his career as a Romantic poet may be said to have begun.” Travel has its rogue and rebel aspects—straying, going out of bounds, escaping—but this journey was as much a quest for an alternate identity as an escapade. The Grand Tour had been a standard feature of English gentlemen’s educations; usually they went by coach to meet people of their own class and see the artworks and monuments of France and Italy. Those connoisseurs of gardens and landscapes Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray went on such a tour in 1739, where they each wrote excitedly of the Alps they crossed en route to Italy. To go on foot and to make Switzerland, rather than Italy, the destination of the trip expressed a radical shift in priorities, away from art and aristocracy toward nature and democracy. To go in 1790 meant joining the flood of radicals converging on Paris to breathe the heady atmosphere of the early days of the French Revolution, before the blood had begun to pour. The Alps themselves, already central objects in the cult of the landscape sublime, were part of the attraction, but so was Switzerland’s republican government and its associations with Rousseau. Their final destination before they boated back down the Rhine was the island of Saint-Pierre, which Rousseau wrote about in the Confessions and the Reveries of a Solitary Walker as a version of the natural paradise. Rousseau is an obvious precursor for Wordsworth, who walked as both a means and an end—to compose and to be.
They had landed in Calais on July 13 and woke the next day to the joyous celebrations of the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, when France was “standing on top of golden hours / And human nature seeming born again.” They walked through
hamlets, towns,
Gaudy with relics of that festival,
Flowers left to wither on triumphal arcs, and window garlands. . . .
Unhoused beneath the evening star we saw
Dances of liberty, and in late hours
Of darkness, dances in the open air.
Wordsworth and Jones had charted their journey with care, however, and walked about thirty miles a day in order to carry out their ambitious plans:
A march it was of military speed
And earth did change her images and form
Before us fast as clouds are changed in heaven.
Day after day, up early and down late,
From vale to vale, from hill to hill we went,
From province on to province did we pass,
Keen hunters in a chase of fourteen weeks.
So vigorous were they that they crossed the Alps without realizing it, much to their disappointment. Already over the final pass and still thinking they had far higher to go, they had cut o
ff on an uphill trail when a peasant set them straight and sent them to finish their descent into Italy, where they made a quick loop past Lake Como before reentering Switzerland. Wordsworth breaks off this narrative at Lake Como, but The Prelude recounts his returns to France in 1791, where his politics continued to develop.
It is entirely Wordsworthian that he tried to understand the Revolution by walking the streets of Paris and visiting “each spot of old and recent fame” from the “dust of the Bastille” to the Champ de Mars and Montmartre. Among the Britons he may have met there are Colonel John Oswald and “Walking Stewart,” two examples of a new kind of pedestrian. Johnston writes, “Oswald had traveled to India, become a vegetarian and nature mystic, walked back to Europe overland, thrown himself into the French Revolution with the direct intent of carrying it back to England.” He would later appear under his own surname in Wordsworth’s early verse drama The Borderers. Stewart was a similar character whose nickname commemorated his remarkable walks—he too had walked back from India, as well as all over Europe and North America—but whose books were diatribes on other subjects. De Quincey wrote of Walking Stewart, “No region, pervious to human feet except, I think, China and Japan, but had been visited by Mr. Stewart in this philsophical style; a style which compels a man to move slowly through a country, and to fall in continually with the natives of that country.” A third eccentric, John Thelwall (mentioned in chapter 2), suggests something of a pattern: autodidacts who took the trinity of radical politics, love of nature, and pedestrianism to extremes. Thelwall became well acquainted with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the early 1790s, and later in that decade, after he narrowly escaped hanging for his politics, sought refuge with them. Wordsworth owned a copy of Thelwall’s Peripatetic, which amid its digressions on philosophy takes stock of the living and working conditions of the laborers being drawn into the beginnings of the industrial revolution. These characters suggest that traveling any distance on foot was the act of a political radical in England, expressing an unconventionality and a willingness to identify and be identified with the poor. Wordsworth himself wrote in a letter of 1795, “I have some thoughts of exploring the country westward of us, in the course of next summer, but in an humble evangelical way; to wit à pied,” and in The Prelude he wrote, “So like a peasant I pursue my way.”
To walk in this way summoned up Rousseau’s complex equation of virtue with simplicity with childhood with nature. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, English aristocrats had linked nature with reason and the current social order, suggesting that things were as they should be. But nature was a dangerous goddess to enthrone. At the latter end of that century, Rousseau and romanticism equated nature, feeling, and democracy, portraying the social order as highly artificial and making revolt against class privilege “only natural.” In his history of eighteenth-century ideas of nature, Basil Willey remarks, “Throughout that turbulent time ‘Nature’ remained the dominant concept,” but its meaning was protean. “The Revolution was made in the name of Nature, Burke attacked it in the name of Nature, and in eodem nomine Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and [radical philosopher William] Godwin replied to Burke.” To walk in the gracious and expensive confines of the garden was to associate walking, nature, the leisure classes, and the established order that secured that leisure. To walk in the world was to link walking with a nature aligned instead with the poor and whatever radicalism would defend their rights and interests. Too, if society deformed nature, then children and the uneducated were, in a radical reversal, the purest and the best. Wordsworth, perfect sponge of his age, soaks up these values and pours them forth as his extraordinary poetry of childhood—his own, and those of his many fictional characters—and of the poor. He took up Rousseau’s task and improved upon it, portraying rather than arguing a relationship between childhood, nature, and democracy. Though only the first two of this trinity are remembered by the worshipers of the trailside god, the third is central to at least the early work. “You know perhaps already that I am of that odious class of men called democrats,” he wrote a friend in 1794, continuing with a confidence that proved unwarranted, “and of that class I shall for ever continue.”
Somewhere on these roads, among these people and these questions, Wordsworth met up with his style. His earliest poetry is lofty, vague, and studded with conventional images, in the mode of Thomson’s Seasons, but it seems to be his revolutionary ardor and sympathetic identification with the poor that saved him from being a minor landscape poet (during the same decade of the 1790s, Dorothy’s writing undergoes a similar transformation, from the aphoristic abstruseness of a Dr. Johnson or Jane Austen to something vividly descriptive and down-to-earth). It changed both subject matter and style. In his retroactive preface to the Lyrical Ballads, the epochal book of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge published in 1798, he wrote, “The principal object, then, proposed in these poems, was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination. . . . Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil . . . and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.” He wrote about the poor as people rather than as figures in fables of virtue or pity, as he wrote about landscapes in their specific details rather than in high-flown generalizations and classical allusions. Choosing plainer language was a political act, with spectacular artistic results.
What is marvelous about Wordsworth’s early poetry is its union of the radical walk for the sake of encounters with the scenic stroll of aesthetic connoisseurs. Looking back, it seems there should have been some tensions between scenery and poverty as subjects, but for the young Wordsworth in that exuberant moment there were none. The landscapes are the more incandescent for being populated by vagrants rather than nymphs, and that incandescence is the more necessary as the birthright and backdrop of the desperate. The recurrent structure of these early poems is a walk interrupted by an encounter with those displaced by the economic turbulence of the time into fellow wanderers. Earlier poets and artists had looked at the cottages and bodies of the poor and found them picturesque or pitiful, but no one with such a voice had found it worthwhile to talk to them before. “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods,” remarked Thoreau, but Wordsworth headed as eagerly to the public roads as to mountains and lakes. People walk streets for the sake of encounters and paths for solitude and scenery; on the road Wordsworth seems to have found an ideal intermediary, a space providing long quiet spells broken by the occasional meeting. He affirmed:
I love a public road: few sights there are
That please me more—such object has had power
O’er my imagination since the dawn
Of childhood, when its disappearing line
Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep
Beyond the limits which my feet had trod,
Was like a guide into eternity,
At least to things unknown and without bound.
Which is to say that the road had a kind of perspectival magic, an allure of the unknown. But it also had a populace:
When I began to enquire,
To watch and question those I met, and held
Familiar talk with them, the lonely roads
Were schools to me in which I daily read
With most delight the passions of mankind,
There saw into the depth of human souls
Souls that appear to have no depth at all
To vulgar eyes. . . .
This education had begun during his schooldays, when he boarded with a retired carpenter and his wife and met peddlers, shepherds, and similar characters. These early experiences seem to have set him at ease with people of another class and at least partially relieved him of that mental barrier that separates the English classes from each other. He once remarked, “Had I been born in
a class which would have deprived me of what is called a liberal education, it is not unlikely that, being strong in body, I should have taken to a way of life such as that in which my Pedlar passed the greater part of his days.” The terrible uncertainty of his own early life, with parents dead and relatives shuttling the children around, seems to have generated a sympathy for the displaced, while his passion for traveling made these mobile characters, in a word, romantic to him. The times themselves were uncertain; the old order had been shaken by the revolutions and insurrections in France, America, and Ireland, and the poor were being displaced by the changing rural scene and dawning industrial revolution. The modern world of people cast adrift, unanchored by the securities of place, work, family, had dawned.
The mobile figure recurs in the work of Wordsworth’s contemporaries too, and walking seems to have provided literal common ground between those traveling to seek adventure and pleasure and those on the road to seek survival. Even now English people tell me that walking plays so profound a role in English culture in part because it is one of the rare classless arenas in which everyone is roughly equal and welcome. The young Wordsworth wrote about discharged soldiers, tinkers, peddlers, shepherds, stray children, abandoned wives, “The Female Vagrant,” “The Leech Gatherer,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” and others who tended to be nomadic or displaced; even the Wandering Jew made an appearance in his poetry and that of many other Romantics. Or as Hazlitt put it in describing the revolutionary transformation of English poetry at the hands of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Robert Southey, “They were surrounded, in company with Muses, by a mixed rabble of idle apprentices and Botany Bay convicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughters in the family of Christ, of ideot boys and mad mothers, and after them ‘owls and night-ravens flew.’ ”
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 15
