Fifteen Eighty Four

When, in his 1716 poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay announced he would instruct his readers on “How to walk clean by Day, and safe by Night”, he firmly positioned his account between two different modes of representing the city. Like Ned Ward’s The London Spy, Gay’s poem acknowledges the chaotic energy – and the dirt and odours – the pedestrian is likely to encounter. At the same time, it offers an account of good conduct and urban sociability like that found in Addison and Steele’s Tatler and Spectator, albeit adapted to the busy streets of the commercial city. In so doing, Gay’s generically playful poem – which borrows from epic, georgic, and pastoral to produce a commentary on modern urban life – raises fascinating and still pertinent questions about what it means to be a walker of the city’s streets.

Taking its cue from Trivia, my book The Art of Walking in London: Representing the Eighteenth-Century City, 1700-1830 considers what representations of pedestrianism can tell us about how the metropolis was imagined and experienced – by writers and artists, visitors and inhabitants – in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the popular imagination, the idea of eighteenth-century London evokes a Hogarthian underworld of dirty streets, daring pickpockets, and chaotic scenes in which new arrivals trace well-worn routes to poverty and prostitution, criminality and death. This image of eighteenth-century London as dark and dangerous has helped to shape a common misconception that only criminals and the poor walked the streets, while Romantic-period poems like William Blake’s “London” and Book VII of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude suggest that the early nineteenth-century was defined by a sense of alienation, as captured in the latter’s pronouncement that “‘The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery’”.

In contrast to these familiar – and limiting – conceptualizations of urban life in this period, a rich tradition of literary and visual urban description sought to grapple with and understand London. My book develops a historically specific account of a range of forms of urban pedestrianism that are distinctive, if not unique, to this period, tracing how the mobility that the idea of walking affords made possible the various surveys of the city that characterize this period, and how walking could also be a subject matter in its own right. I examine how in John Gay’s Trivia the act of walking is elevated – at once comically and seriously – into an art that allows the city’s commercial life to operate unimpeded by polite walkers wishing to stroll at their leisure; how the pastime of the promenade brought Londoners from across social classes together and thereby provided rich material for satirists; how strangers were encouraged to walk as a way of exploring London, making the most of the “Fine and Principal Streets” that were “the best for Foot Passengers” as they followed the tours outlined in guidebooks; how walking through the city allowed authors of spy-guides to draw sharp contrasts between high and low life and to reveal to readers the cheats of London; and how, in the early nineteenth century, the rapid growth of the city led to an increasing sense of both the pleasures and frustrations of urban life, comically explored through the reworking of recurrent tropes and images.

In tracing the models of mobility and spectatorship that were available to and used by writers of this period, I explore how the early eighteenth-century accounts of the city by Ward, Addison and Steele, and Gay echo and reverberate throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their influence will be seen in works including satires of social climbing on the Mall, accounts of London that imagine the needs and experiences of new arrivals, and the “spy” guides to London published in the second half of the century. In the early nineteenth century, writers and artists reimagine these earlier accounts of urban life, offering a retrospect on eighteenth-century London as they reveal familiar scenes and descriptions to be comically inadequate for describing the present moment. The Art of Walking in London thus traces a sense of continuity and change, exploring how the city was theorized in this period via the repetition and reworking of key scenes, genres, and texts associated with walking.

We live in a moment when seemingly public spaces like sidewalks, squares, and gardens are often privately owned and monitored, and when smartphones tend to keep individual pedestrians in their own bubble. In response to William Wordsworth’s sense of men in cities as selfish and lacking in “natural affections”, William Hazlitt countered in his essay “On Londoners and Country People” that “[i]n London there is a public” made up of everyone. Without wanting to diminish the historical distinctiveness of the works I explore, the questions they raise can remind us of what it means to be part of a public shaped in part by art, literature, and the act of walking the city streets.