Different periods within the modern era can claim what I shall call their distinctive locomotive signature: a form of travel which, appearing for the first time or reaching a particular stage of development, gives a decisive slant to social and cultural life and leaves an imprint on the literary production of the period. For Modernism it was the car; for the Victorian period the railway; for the 1820s-30s the stagecoach. For the early Romantic period, the period which this paper substantially addresses, the locomotive signature is walking, or pedestrianism--a term that was coined at the time in implicit recognition of a new cultural phenomenon.
What was new, of course, was not walking itself, which had been the "default" form of travel among the poor - practised by migrants, nomads, exiles, refugees, the homeless or dispossessed of whatever sort - from the beginning of human history, but voluntary, recreational walking among those in the middling orders of society. This paper draws upon research carried out for my book, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (forthcoming summer 1997 from Macmillan/St Martin's Press), to review the range of practical, political and aesthetic motives that gave birth to this democratizing revolution in the history of travel, which found its most complete and characteristic expression in the domestic or Continental pedestrian tour of the 1780s-1790s. I shall allude to writing by young Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and John Thelwall, as well as by a number of now obscure late eighteenth-century travellers, to encapsulate the combination of bodily and mental freedoms which comprised the makeshift ideology of first-wave pedestrianism.
From one point of view, today's trekkers, hikers and long-distance walkers are the direct lineal descendants of the radical pedestrians of the late eighteenth century. Indeed, there are manifest continuities between the self-representations and avowed beliefs of the latter group and of eminent walkers/travel writers of the present day, such as Dervla Murphy. However, the national and global contexts in which modern walking tours take place are so different in every respect from those in which Wordsworth and others broke the mould of middle-class tourism that it must be doubtful whether walking can still carry, or perform, the same values in an unadulterated way. Equally, it is one of the features of postmodernity that cultural products and activities associated with the past reappear within an ironic citationality. For this reason the locomotive signature of the present age is in all probability neither singular nor straightforwardly legible. Whether it is possible to walk within quotation marks is a question raised in the second half of this paper, which, by reference to recent exemplars of this sub-genre of travel writing, asks whether pedestrian tourists of the 1980s and 1990s are merely the very last Romantics, or the prisoners of a residual ideology, or the pioneers of a newly authentic experience of passage.
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