3 “A Busy Day with Me, or at Least with My Feet & My Stockings”
Chapter Abstract: This chapter looks at walking as an eighteenth-century elite activity and discusses the ways in which health played a role in women’s walking in England. A particularly English pastime, walking played an important role in social lives and guaranteed a suitable amount of daily exercise for anyone interested in a healthy life. ‘Yesterday was a busy day with me, or at least with my feet & my stockings’, wrote Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra Austen on a Sunday in April 1805, perfectly describing a great part of the upper-class elite’s London activities. Walking gave women and men alike the means to contest urban space: gendered, but also class-related, tensions were played out in this space.
Walking emphasized women’s relationship to their environment. This chapter argues not only that eighteenth-century walkers gave different meanings to urban and country walks, but also, especially, that these differences were intriguingly gendered. By comparing walking in the country to urban walks, the meanings of urban geographies and gender mixed in a fascinating way: women wandered and strolled in urban space for a myriad of reasons, and in places where they hardly were expected to be seen.


Running Head Right-hand: “A Busy Day with Me”
Running Head Left-hand: Marjo Kaartinen
3
“A Busy Day with Me, or at Least with My Feet & My Stockings”
Walking for Health and the Female Pedestrian’s Spaces in Eighteenth-Century British Towns
Marjo Kaartinen
Introduction
After having walked some eight miles on an April Sunday in 1805, Jane Austen wrote to her sister that it had been a busy day for her feet and stockings.[endnoteRef:1] Busy walking days were a shared eighteenth-century elite experience. Therefore, when we read eighteenth-century novels, diaries and letters, or look at paintings, we find women and men walking.[endnoteRef:2] They walked miles and miles, in London, in smaller towns, in villages—and beyond.[endnoteRef:3] This chapter proposes that, since bodily exercise was strikingly important for early-modern people, walking for health was a very important reason why women could so naturally claim cities and towns as their own spaces. From this followed a need to create and recreate towns to accommodate women’s walking, and especially to create country-like opportunities for urban walking and getting fresh air in cities and towns.[endnoteRef:4]	Comment by AuQ: AU: In the content for footnote #3, you cite a 1998 source by Eichberg. Please provide the full source information for the Eichberg source, as this is the only citation of this source in the book. [1:  Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, Sun 21 April 1805, in Jane Austen, Letters 1796–1817, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1955), 64–5.]  [2:  For the history of walking, see Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: a history of walking (New York: Verso, 2001); Joseph A. Amato, On foot: a history of walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004). See also Heikki Lempa, Beyond the gymnasium: educating the middle class bodies in classical Germany (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 163–93. Walking in England and especially in London has been studied in literature and printed media. Alison F. O’Byrne’s dissertation ‘Walking, rambling and promenading in eighteenth-century London: a literary and cultural history’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2003) provides a systematic analysis of the literate urban ramble. On smaller towns especially, see Peter Borsay, ‘The rise of the promenade: the social and cultural use of space in the English provincial town c.1660–1800’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 9, 2 (1986), 125–40. On the possibilities of digital study of the history of walking, see Joanna Guldi, ‘The history of walking and the digital turn: stride and lounge in London, 1808–1851’, The Journal of Modern History 84, 1 (2012), 116–44.]  [3:  It has often been noted that the outdoor enthusiasm of the English was far stronger than elsewhere. For example, in Germany, as Eichberg has proposed, the elite began to move to outdoor sports from the very end of the eighteenth century. Eichberg 1998, 51–2. I would like to suggest caution, however, since it is very likely that people walked for exercise much more than thought outside England as well. This is what Madame de Sévigné reported about Liselotte von der Pfalz, a newcomer in the French court in 1671: ‘she has no use for doctors and even less for medicines . . . When her doctor was presented to her, she said that she did not need him, that she had never been purged or bled, and that when she is not feeling well she goes for a walk and cures herself by exercise’. Mary Lindemann, Medicine and society in early modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 201–2. On 2 November 1714, Mary Countess Cowper wrote how the foreign princesses of the court showed how they could walk at least as well as the English ladies. Mary, Countess Cowper, Diary of Mary Countess Cowper, lady of the bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714–1720 (London: John Murray, 1864), 13. But this too suggests that people considered walking an English pastime. See also Amanda Vickery, The gentleman’s daughter: women’s lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 250.]  [4:  Peter Borsay, The English urban renaissance: culture and society in the provincial town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).] 

A significant element in the growth of the towns, and especially London since the seventeenth century, had been the birth of the social season: that was when elite women occupied London.[endnoteRef:5] A spiral of urban growth followed. When there were more and more elite women with their specific needs in towns, the quickly growing cities had to offer them more and more entertainment and proper, decent and safe places, offering fresh air, to walk. It is therefore significant, I propose, to see that, for the elites, health was an essential motivation for walking. I argue against Giorgio Riello’s proposition that city walking had no health connotations.[endnoteRef:6] On the contrary, for those who did not need to walk—that is, most of the elites—health was the initial motivation for walking, something often so self-evident to contemporaries that it was superfluous to point it out. Therefore, it can be easily missed in sources, as it often requires reading ‘between lines’ or inverse interpretation. Other motivations to walking, such as social display, were secondary. Walking was not needed for social display, and walking—an activity which was necessary for the poor—did not display wealth in the way that, for example, a horse and carriage did. The importance of movement for health becomes clear if one looks at medical texts and private diaries and letters, as will be done in what follows. [5:  I have argued elsewhere for women’s role in shaping seventeenth-century London. See Marjo Kaartinen, ‘Women’s metropolis—elite women in early modern London’, Women’s History Magazine 53 (2006), 4–12. For essential related discussion, see Ian W. Archer, ‘Social networks in Restoration London: the evidence from Samuel Pepys’s diary’, in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, eds, Communities in early modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 76–94; Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English society, 1650–1850: the emergence of separate spheres? (London and New York: Longman, 1998), esp. 269; Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Walking the city streets: the urban odyssey in eighteenth-century England’, Journal of Urban History 16 (1990), 132–74, at 133–4; Miles Ogborn, Spaces of modernity: London’s geographies, 1680–1780 (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1998), esp. 110–11. See Amy Erickson, Women and property in early modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), 9–10, for the discrepancies between the ideals where women should remain indoors and the practice in which women indeed did not live to these ideals. In her study on the social geography of Grosvenor Square, Schlarman has shown the importance of women in shaping the architecture of London. See Julie Schlarman, ‘The social geography of Grosvenor Square: mapping gender and politics, 1720–1760’, London Journal 28, 1 (2003), 8–29.]  [6:  I also propose a more moderate attitude towards the conceived dangers of urban areas which Giorgio Riello, for example, has pointed out. Giorgio Riello, A foot in the past: consumers, producers, and footwear in the long eighteenth century (Oxford: Pasold Research Fund and Oxford University Press, 2006), 61.] 

There was a constant need for semi-rural walking spaces that were gendered safe for women and that could provide fresh air and country experiences even in the most polluted of places, London. My argument draws on Michel de Certeau’s idea that walking is a spatial practice per se. For Certeau, walking is ‘a process of appropriation’; thus, walking organizes and recreates space.[endnoteRef:7] Certeau’s idea also suggests that while walks naturally had many purposes in the eighteenth century—both women and men walked to take care of their businesses, go shopping, improve and maintain their health, present and display their standing in the world and for various social reasons[endnoteRef:8]—many walks were taken specifically in order to get spatial experiences, and that these experiences were health-related, or at least were intertwined with health. This chapter looks at the ways in which the pleasure of healthy walks created spatial experiences that were quintessential semi-rural elements in elite women’s urban life. First, a short look at Galenic thought on health is needed to understand the importance of moderate exercise for health. Second, the importance of health is explored in eighteenth-century female walkers’ thinking. Finally, the chapter takes a look at the semi-rurality of the walkers’ spatial experiences.	Comment by AuQ: AU: Is the change from ‘The constant need’ to ‘There was a constant need’ in this sentence okay? If it is not, please confirm what about the constant need should be noted in this sentence, as one or more words appear to be missing from the sentence. [7:  Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 97–101.]  [8:  Discussing seventeenth-century Paris and London, Karen Newman formulated this elegantly: ‘Walking the city was undertaken for myriad purposes—to carry on business, to shop and consume, to encounter those whom one cannot hope or expect to encounter elsewhere in more exclusive interior spaces, to see and to be seen, in short, to absorb the social knowledge offered in streets, shops, by criers and street sellers, in outdoor theaters, by passersby.’ Karen Newman, Cultural capitals: early modern London and Paris (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 60.] 

Galenic Walks and Beyond
Studying the cures for melancholy in the seventeenth century, Robert Burton praised moderate exercise, noting that ‘the most pleasant of all outward pastimes is that of Aretaeus, deambulatio per amoena loca’, that is, ‘strolling through pleasant scenery’.[endnoteRef:9] He then described the ideal walking space: ‘to walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains, and such like pleasant places’. This is in fact very close to what the eighteenth-century urban walking spaces, parks and gardens, tried to create. But in fact, for Burton, walking in this kind of paradise was not the only option. Urban walks were also beneficial. He noted that ‘it will laxare animos, refresh the soul of man, to see fair-built cities, streets, theatres, temples obelisks, etc’.[endnoteRef:10] Walking was a matter of both the body and soul, and therefore it improved the health of both. Rebecca Solnit calls the latter kind of walking ‘a conscious cultural act’ and places its beginning in Rousseau, but Burton alone gives us grounds for seeing this as a much older act.[endnoteRef:11] [9:  Robert Burton, The anatomy of melancholy (New York: New York Review Books, (1621) 2001), pt 2, sect. 2, 74.]  [10:  Ibid., 76.]  [11:  Solnit, Wanderlust, 14, notes: ‘The history of walking goes back further than the history of human beings, but the history of walking as a conscious cultural act rather than a means to an end is only a few centuries old in Europe, and Rousseau stands at it beginning.’] 

To appreciate the importance of health in the act of walking, it is necessary to understand the importance of exercise for health. Exercise and air had been key categories in the ‘non-naturals’ from ancient times, and even after Galenic theory was more or less rejected as a valid scientific theory in the course of the seventeenth century, exercise and taking fresh air remained essential in medical theories and the practical, everyday maintenance of health.[endnoteRef:12] Galenic thought persisted, however. Poor Robin’s Book of Knowledge (1688) illustrates this, as it reinforced old ideas about walking, declaring the following adage ‘old and true’: [12:  Importantly, see also Laura Williams, ‘“To recreate and refresh their dulled spirites in the sweet and wholesome ayre”: green space and the growth of the city’, in J. F. Merritt, ed, Imagining early modern London: perceptions and portrayals of the city from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 185–213. See also Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 233–4; and Rosemary Sweet, The English town, 1680–1840 (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 241–3.] 

After Dinner prate a while,
After Supper walk a mile.[endnoteRef:13]	Comment by Vignesh Sivanesan: 
AU: Please provide missing publisher name. [13:  Poor Robin’s book of knowledge (London, 1688), 125.] 

To understand the importance of walking as a beneficial exercise taken to improve health, looks and the body’s humoral balance in the long eighteenth century, it is useful to keep in mind earlier English Galenic writing on walking. Exercise was necessary, since, as The Governayle of Helthe (orig. 1490–1?), one of the first printed medical texts in English, put it, ‘when water resteth to moche it stynketh. Soo iron & eche metall rustyth when it restyth’. Further, walking strengthened the body and gave the walker bright eyes that delighted ‘in seeing farre & nere’.[endnoteRef:14] Exercise offered bodily health and satisfaction, but walking also provided walkers with an opportunity to immerse themselves in the scenery, an important point to note when considering walking as ‘a conscious cultural act’.	Comment by Vignesh Sivanesan: 
AU: Please provide missing publisher name for ‘gouernayle of helthe’. [14:  The gouernayle of helthe (London, 1585), f. A4r—A5v, f. A7. For more on the genre, see Mary Fissell, ‘Popular medical writing’, The Oxford history of popular print culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 418–31.] 

In his Dyetary for Health (1542), Andrew Boorde exhorted his readers to walk right after they rose for the day: ‘after that you be apparelled, walke in your gardayne or parke a thousande pace or two’. He believed that the exercise opened pores and augmented natural heat.[endnoteRef:15] Inversely, walking in adverse conditions was not deemed healthy for precisely the same reasons. From contemporary writing, we know that early-modern women listened to these exhortations and took morning strolls. They walked at other times of the day, too: morning walks, afternoon excursions and evening strolls were all popular. Morning walks seem to have been more exercise- and health-oriented than evening walks, which were often social in nature. Evening walks also tended to be conducted in closeby squares, parks and gardens so that the dangers of cold late-evening air and darkness could be minimized.[endnoteRef:16] [15:  Andrew Boorde, Introduction and dyetary with Barnes in the defence of the Berde (London: Early English Text Society, 1870), 248. This was also the exhortation in The gouernayle of helthe, f. A3r–A4r.]  [16:  The accomplish’d female instructor: or, a very useful companion for ladies, gentlewomen, and others (London: James Knapton, 1704), 149.] 

Margaret Hoby serves as an example of an early seventeenth-century female walker who followed this advice in town as well as in the country. In 1600 she visited London and reported on her London day in her diary. After morning prayers, she ‘walked to the Comune Garden’. She then continued her usual routines, busying herself in her chamber after lunch (probably doing her needlework and other such occupations), visiting or being visited, and performing ‘my ordenarie exercises’ until bed time.[endnoteRef:17] When she visited York, her days were similarly filled with prayer, visits and walks.[endnoteRef:18] [17:  2 December 1600, in Joanna Moody, ed, The private life of an Elizabethan lady: the diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 127.]  [18:  Saturday, 12 April 1600, in Moody, Private life of an Elizabethan Lady, 73.] 

The typical elite woman’s London day in the eighteenth century was not unlike Margaret Hoby’s day a century or more earlier: it included visits and walks, and very likely some evening entertainment. Although Galenic theory no longer dominated academic thinking, walking was still popularly understood to be an essential aspect of everyday life for the maintenance of health. It was considered to improve the circulation of blood, and its overall benefits for the digestive system were widely acknowledged, as were its specific benefits for improving such conditions as jaundice or nervous diseases.[endnoteRef:19] While perhaps satirizing the overarching health benefits attributed to walking, John Gay’s Trivia (1716) reflects popular medical literature in mentioning rheumatism, asthma, gout and the stone as the targets of walking.[endnoteRef:20] The diarist Nancy Woodforde similarly made a connection between walking and health in a diary entry in her diary in 1792: ‘May God Almighty grant that I may continue to walk as well as I can now, and that I may enjoy as good a state of health throughout this Year as I do at present. Walked a Mile this Morning, a mild pleasant Day.’[endnoteRef:21] Her note originated in the long and troublesome childbed of a dear friend who had had to lie down for weeks. For Woodforde, not walking came to symbolize frightening inactivity. Walking was synonymous with life, good health and happiness. [19:  William Forster, A treatise on the causes of most diseases incident to human bodies (London: J. Clark et al., 1746), 366; William Buchan, Domestic medicine (Dublin: Wogan & Slater, 1797), 85, 372, 423. See also Williams, ‘To recreate and refresh’, 194–5.]  [20:  John Gay, Trivia: or, the art of walking the streets of London, 2nd edn (London: Bernard Lintot, 1716), 32–3.]  [21:  1 Jan., in Nancy Woodforde, ‘A diary for the year 1792’, in Dorothy Heighes Woodforde, ed, Woodforde papers and diaries, with a new introduction by Roy Winstanley (Bungay: Morrow & Co and the Parson Woodforde Society, 1932), 33–85, at 37.] 

If we see elite town life only as being built upon a continuous parade of entertainment, we may overlook the importance of walking per se in eighteenth-century culture and, importantly, we might miss seeing how walking legitimated elite women’s freedom of movement. Because these thoughts were rarely spelled out, and sources tend to fall silent, some hints for the importance of walking can be found by looking at situations where women could not walk. These situations can be found, for example, when they discuss adverse conditions that put up obstacles to their walking.
What becomes apparent from women’s sources is that walking was such an important pastime that only serious adversities put a temporary stop to it.[endnoteRef:22] One of these was cold air. Before antibiotics, all colds were a potential death risk. Because colds were thought to be the result of exposure to adverse weather conditions, it was conceived that cold night air, and especially rain and dampness, could pose a serious danger to health. So too did ‘walking barefoot on cold pavements’ (something unlikely to affect elite women but that was recognized as a serious threat to the health of poor women).[endnoteRef:23] Consequently, in April 1689, when Lettice Bankes had been ill for two months, her husband lay the blame for her illness on getting cold and wet: [22:  Naturally, walking gear was important, too. See Riello, A foot in the past, 58–74, 194–5; Corfield, ‘Walking the city streets’, 144. See also Giorgio Riello, ‘The material culture of walking: spaces of methodologies in the long eighteenth century’, in Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, eds, Everyday objects: medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 41–55.]  [23:  Forster, A treatise on the cause of most diseases, 127. On the dangers of walking in cold night air, see also, for example, John French, A pocket companion to Harrowgate spaw (Halifax: P. Darby, 1760), 30; The art of preserving beauty (London: T. Axtell, 1789), 103.] 

My Wife with walking out one cold night after rain and without hoods, hath got such a cold that she hath been in Bed these two Months and is very weak . . . this proves very unfortunate to us.[endnoteRef:24] [24:  Lyme letters, 1660–1760, ed. Lady Evelyn Newton (London: Heinemann, 1925), 167.] 

Lettice survived, but she had been considered near death. Walking in the wrong conditions had nearly killed her. Still, many women were more or less obsessed with walking. Sarah Osborn, writing from London in early June 1722, recognized rain as a danger and admitted that she could not walk if there was much rain. Normally, however, she would walk:
I believe the country will soon be pleasant, but hitherto I fancy you have had much Rain, for certainly it has been so here, and I remember last year at Bristol it was the same. It spoyls my walks sometimes, for most mornings, instead of ordering my Coach and six, I order my shoes and ten toes to trot away to Chealsey.[endnoteRef:25] [25:  Emily F. D. Osborn, ed, Political and social letters of a lady of the eighteenth century, 1721–1771, (New York: Dodd Mead & Company, 1891), 24.] 

This suggests that while Sarah Osborn did not deliberately walk in rain, she did not need to walk at all (she could just have ordered her coach), but that she chose to walk regardless. There was clearly something alluring in walking to Chelsea.
Perhaps for her, walking was, as it was for Nancy Woodforde, her ‘chief delight’. Woodforde had long walks of three miles and more, and strolls in the gardens, but she also did not walk if it rained.[endnoteRef:26] Early in March 1792, she noted in her diary that she had been caught up in rain when walking to see friends: ‘Walked up to Weston H[ous]e to see Mrs. Custance. Was caught in the Rain going up and was very warm and much Fatigued owing to the Rain when I got there’.[endnoteRef:27] Later that month she noted that she had been ‘prevented from proceeding on my Journey by Rain, which was a great disappointment to me’; several days after that, a thunderstorm kept her inside.[endnoteRef:28] [26:  22–24 January; 5 November, in Woodforde, ‘A diary for the year 1792’, 41, 79.]  [27:  2 March, ibid., 46–7.]  [28:  24, 27 March, ibid., 51. Similarly, for Mary Delany, rain could spoil her ‘sport’. See 24 January 1732/3, in Angélique Day, ed, Letters from Georgian Ireland: the correspondence of Mary Delany, 1731–1768 (Belfast: The Friar’s Bush Press, 1949).] 

Rain was not the only nuisance a walker faced. One of the problems associated with towns, especially with gigantic London, was air quality. Getting fresh air was one of the key reasons for walking. To enjoy fresher air, the royal parks with their vast spaces were immensely popular, but squares also provided fresh air. The outskirts of London were havens of fresh air, too. Catherine Talbot commented in a letter to Elizabeth Carter in September 1759 from Lambeth: ‘I pitied you this morning, when I was riding under a beautiful blue sky, and saw the immense thick smoke you was breathing in the city’.[endnoteRef:29] She had been watching the city smoke soaring during her riding trip in Lambeth, which, in the mid-eighteenth century, was still far enough outside London to avoid the worst of the pollution. [29:  Miss Talbot to Mrs. Carter, Lambeth, 23 September 1759, in A series of letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the year 1742 to 1770 (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1809, 4 vols), vol. 2, 297. Interestingly, as if to prove her constant nature gazing, she continued: ‘Did you see the fine Aurora yesterday evening?’ Catherine Talbot was a member of archbishop Secker’s household, and at the time lived in Lambeth Palace.] 

If we look at elite women walkers and their attitude towards the health hazards of walking, the importance of walking for its own sake is very clear. We do, though, often get hints of this only inversely, when the walkers mention the adverse conditions they needed to face in keeping up their walking routines. In this way we glimpse the importance they attached to walking for health, when even walking in polluted town air could be considered a good choice, certainly better than not walking at all. Lady Louisa Conolly wrote in February 1770:
We have had two days’ frost, which has been very fortunate as the physicians say, for it has cleared the air, and, before, the town was so remarkably unhealthy that it was really frightful. As yet, I have kept to walking out every day, which I do believe is the safest method to avoid illness.[endnoteRef:30] [30:  10 February 1770, in ‘Letters of Lady Louisa Conolly’, in Brian Fitzgerald, ed, Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster (Dublin: Irish Manuscript Commission, 1957, 3 vols), vol. 3, 43.] 

Unfortunately, she does not mention where in London she walked; there probably was no need to reiterate the walking spaces, as they were regular and known to the recipient.
Enjoyable exercise was very healthy, and her regimen paid off. A few weeks later Lady Louisa confirmed that she had become ‘more hardy’:
We have had a frost these two or three days, very cold, but fine sunshine. I never kept, upon the whole, so regularly to going out as I have done this winter, and think it has answered, for I never was more hardy, and have not had one bad cold.[endnoteRef:31] [31:  19 March 1770, ibid., 55.] 

But certainly, even though it was fully understood that London’s air was not the best, health-giving metropolitan walks could be taken in royal parks and in the tightly knit network of squares. These green spaces created a haven of fresher air, reachable on foot and manageable even by someone with a tight social schedule.
Considering the many walking opportunities, and the importance of health, it is hardly surprising that adverse walking conditions were eagerly tackled in eighteenth-century towns, notably, in London. Streets needed to be clean, even and well-illuminated precisely because people wanted to walk on them. Significant changes were made in the eighteenth-century urban infrastructure that markedly improved the ease and safety of walking. These included street lighting (Act 1736), paving (1762) and cleaning the streets, and adding street signs and house numbers (1765).[endnoteRef:32] The German observer J. W. Archenholz praised the conditions, especially the lighting and paving of late eighteenth-century London streets.[endnoteRef:33] It was widely recognized that London and many smaller towns put a great deal of effort into pleasing England’s enthusiastic walkers. Miles and miles of specific malls and paths were built. The St James Square Act in 1726 in particular had an enormous influence upon the older squares, bringing them back into use from being waste dumps and turning them into enjoyable, even ornamental, green spaces where one could stroll and converse. The act made residents made responsible for the upkeep of the squares; many other squares followed suit. Their development made them not only pleasurable but also safer.[endnoteRef:34] [32:  Corfield, ‘Walking the city streets’, 150; O’Byrne, ‘Walking, rambling and promenading’, 9–10, 207; Mary J. Carter, ‘The politics of walking in the long eighteenth century’ (PhD thesis, Emory University, 2008), 43. Miles Ogborn discusses this project as an issue of cultural politics; see Ogborn, Spaces of modernity, 75–115.]  [33:  Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, A picture of England: containing a description of the laws, customs, and manners of England. Interspersed with curious and interesting anecdotes (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1790). Visitors to London were drawn to walking, too. See, for example, Göran Rydén, ‘Viewing and walking: Swedish visitors to eighteenth-century London’, Journal of Urban History 39, 2 (2013), 255–74.]  [34:  A short history of London’s garden squares, www.londongardenstrust.org/history/squares1700.htm (accessed 15 December 2017); The landscape history of Hyde Park, www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/hyde-park/about-hyde-park/landscape-history (accessed 15 December 2017).] 

Urban walks were a sign of a town with aspirations to polite society, and no self-respecting town could ignore the call of feet.[endnoteRef:35] When eighteenth-century London grew, the elites expanded their dominion towards the West. This was where pleasant rural walks had previously taken place, and the West retained its airy feel. As Raymond Williams among others has shown, the relationship between the town and the country has always been flexible, and the border permeable. In various ways, towns and even a peerless metropolis such as London had many country-like features to offer walkers. While residents of the typical small European town never were far from country roads or fields, even the residents of London crowded the streets, many on foot, on walks leading outside of its busy centre, particularly on Sundays.[endnoteRef:36] The popularity of these healthful practices and the quest for fresh air gave incentive to developers and was reflected in the incorporation of country-like urban elements in town planning. Parks, gardens and even squares, (although squares were ‘not spacious enough for those who walk fast in towns’) were thought to purify the air and bring nature to the town.[endnoteRef:37] [35:  Vickery, Gentleman’s daughter, 250; Corfield, ‘Walking the city streets’, 135, 162–3 n. 17. See also Carl B. Estabrook, Urbane and rustic England: culturalties and social spheres in the provinces, 1660–1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4; Anna Bryson, From courtesy to civility: changing codes of conduct in early modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 138–9; Girouard, The English country house: a social and architectural history (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 191–3.]  [36:  Raymond Williams, The country and the city (London: Hogarth, 1985), 221, and passim.]  [37:  Williams, ‘To recreate and refresh’, 196–7; quotation from Schlarman, ‘The social geography’, 15, on the exclusivity of squares, 15–16, 18–21. Williams notes that ‘the value of parks and gardens lay not just in being self-contained pockets to retreat to for draughts of fresh air. Rather, in being drawn into the city, nature could extend a positive influence over the urban environment as a whole and help cleanse the atmosphere.’ Williams, ‘To recreate and refresh’, 196–7.] 

From Indoor Urban Walks to Semi-Rural Rambles
Fresh air was so important that walking indoors was often considered a less satisfactory form of walking.[endnoteRef:38] Nevertheless, indoor walking had been an important concept since the seventeenth century, and it had remained as an option.[endnoteRef:39] In sociable terms, indoor walking was very fashionable in the eighteenth-century elite society: it was highly fashionable, pleasurable and delightful, and especially so at Ranelagh. [38:  Miss Talbot to Mrs. C., Lambeth, Nov. 28, 1763, in A series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, vol. 3, 79.]  [39:  On walking in galleries, see Orlin, Locating Privacy, 226–61; Mark Girouard, Life in the English country house (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978).] 

In late eighteenth-century London, Ranelagh’s Rotunda was the hotspot of the polite society. One came here to listen to music, to walk, to make an appearance and, of course, to engage in polite conversation. Ambulator (1787), ‘a stranger’s companion to London’, describes how the Rotunda’s floor was covered with a thick carpet, so that one could walk silently even when the music played. The author described walking in the Rotunda:
for this amusement of walking round the rotunda may be considered as one of the pleasures of the place; and indeed, great numbers of both sexes take a particular delight in it; it is at once exercise and entertainment, and in the company of a person we esteem, the pleasure is further heightened, and the beauties of the place, if no other subject occur, furnish ample topics for conversation.[endnoteRef:40]	Comment by Vignesh Sivanesan: 
AU: Please provide missing publisher name. [40:  Ambulator; or, the stranger’s companion in a tour round London, within the circuit of twenty-five miles (London, 1787), 177.] 

Walking in Ranelagh was the epitome of urban walking: it provided the walker with indoor and outdoor venues, with its carefully designed walkways and gardens. But urban walkers longed for more rural rambles amidst their busy town lives as well. Country-like rambles were possible in London, as well in smaller towns, even though in London one had to travel a bit longer to get outside the most polluted areas. In the early eighteenth century, Kensington had still been ‘country’, and many elite women considered walking to and in Kensington an especially pleasurable and healthy pastime and exercise.[endnoteRef:41] A women’s guide to health reproached women who thought that walking in London was not convenient: [41:  Mary Countess Cowper wrote about the Princess’s walk in her diary: 27, 28 November 1714: Mary, Countess Cowper, Diary, 23. Queen Mary and Queen Anne both considered Kensington (Palace) a retreat. Queen Mary wrote to William of Orange in 1690 that she went to Kensington ‘as often I can for air’. Queen Mary to the king, William of Orange, Whitehall 26 August 1690, in Marjorie Bowen, ed, The third Mary Stuart: Mary of York, Orange & England: being a character study with memoirs and letters of Queen Mary II of England, 1662–1694 (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1929), 222a. For Queen Anne, Kensington was a ‘place to get a little air and quiet’, as she wrote to the Duchess of Marlborough in May 1704: Beatrice Curtis Brown, ed, The letters and diplomatic instructions of Queen Anne (London: Cassell, 1968), 144.] 

There are some ladies who pass most of their time in London, that scarcely walk twenty yeards in a stretch, from one end of the year[d] to the other. They will say that a town-life is inconvenient for that recreation. But that is an argument which I cannot admit: for, pray where can they find a more delightful spot than Kensington-gardens? And how soon might they be transported thither in their coaches?[endnoteRef:42]	Comment by Abdul Jalil: Please check that spelling “twenty yeards” for correctness. [42:  Letters to the ladies, on the preservation of health and beauty (London: Robinson and Roberts, 1770), 161.] 

The anonymous author shared the understanding that Kensington was especially suitable for walking. In offering convenience and delight, it provided the walker with both the pleasures of exercise and pleasures for the senses. As a space, it was all one needed for walking: Kensington offered a semi-rural experience.
Along with Kensington, Hampstead, Marylebone and, from the early nineteenth century onwards, Regent’s Park, were for Londoners, its seasonal inhabitants and occasional visitors places of semi-rural excursions, places to enjoy the country air, especially on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.[endnoteRef:43] Clearly, these green spaces on the outskirts of the metropolis were considered nearly comparable to the countryside proper in regard to health, and were, in that sense, essentially semi-rural. For example, when Catherine Talbot returned to Lambeth in 1760, having recovered from an illness in Bristol, she wrote happily to Elizabeth Carter about enjoying the pleasures of the town, including the ‘many green lanes’ and gardens: [43:  Williams, ‘To recreate and refresh’, 198.] 

[M]y health God be thanked is getting as stout as you could wish, and that good Mr. Ford does not think there will be any occasion for a second trip to Bristol. I sleep well, have a good appetite for plain mutton, and have enjoyed the sweet spring weather to the utmost, in riding, walking, and lounging in a coach, and am grown as fond as one ought to be of many green lanes in the environes, and may gay spots in the garden which has been dressed in its gayest colors, and all the beauty of blossoms. We drank tea in the gallery and looked as summer like as could be.[endnoteRef:44] [44:  Miss Talbot to Mrs Carter, Lambeth, 26 April 26, 1760, in A series of letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, vol. 2, 320–1.] 

Lambeth’s beautiful scenery, fresh air and good weather—all experienced through walking, riding or driving—combined to create a healthful space in a setting which bordered both town and country.[endnoteRef:45] The sensation was heightened with seeing the pollution of London in the distance. Talbot made the most of her location: she was very close to town, yet in the calm of Lambeth, and enjoyed the pleasurable space around her: ‘Indeed I go to few public places, and when I walk, it is not in the Mall, but merely to breathe this balmy air, and rejoice in this continual sunshine’.[endnoteRef:46] [45:  Catherine Talbot was an eager walker and rider. On August she wrote to Mrs Carter on her riding trips: ‘Today I spent two hours and a half riding through most delightful lanes to Richmond, to take leave of Lady Grey for the summer . . . On Tuesday I rode to Wimbleton (in due time I shall get as far as Mrs. Duranda’s at Putney), we visited Mrs. Poyntz, admired the very charming park, walked to the menagerie. Miss Talbot to Mrs. Carter, Lambeth, 15 August 1760, A series of letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, vol. 2, 345–6.]  [46:  Miss Talbot to Mrs Carter, Piccadilly, 9 Mar. 9 1750, ibid., vol. 1, 329.] 

‘My Walking . . . Is a Happiness’
It is a given that smaller towns offered semi-rural experiences much more effortlessly than the acceleratingly growing London. When Fanny Burney was staying in Lynn, a town of less than 10,000 inhabitants, she would take an hour-long morning walk in the fields near the town before breakfast. She delighted in the fields, and clearly her morning exercise had a special and very strong spatial meaning for her: ‘The fields are, in my Eyes, particularly charming at that time in the morning—the sun is warm & not sultry—& there is scarse sic a soul to be seen’.[endnoteRef:47] While enjoying small-town pleasures, she could easily create a country-like spatial experience which was beneficial for the mind and body. She was very satisfied with her life in Lynn: ‘to work, Read, Walk, & play on the Harpsichord—these are our employments, & we find them sufficient to fill up all our Time without ever being tired’.[endnoteRef:48] This is echoed in Mary Delany’s description of her days in Delville, on the outskirts of Dublin, in the company of her friend Letitia Bushe: ‘she paints for me in the morning and draws in the evening, which with reading, prating, walking, backgammon and puss in the corner employ the hours of the day and evening so fully that we do not feel how fast they fly’.[endnoteRef:49] [47:  10 August 1768 in Fanny Burney, The early journals and letters of Fanny Burney: vol. 1, 1768–1773 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 23.]  [48:  3 May 1770, ibid., 134.]  [49:  3 Jan. 1744/5, Letters from Georgian Ireland, 100.] 

Resort towns especially offered the visiting company and residents a tempting combination of urban excitement and essentially country pleasures. Fanny Burney, writing in 1773, was delighted with the scenery that Teignmouth (and Devon) offered:
We have been taking a most delightful Walk on the Top of the Rocks & Cliffs by the sea shore. Mrs Western is so charmed with this Country, that she endeavours to prevail with her Husband to Buy an Estate & reside here:—indeed it is a most tempting spot.[endnoteRef:50] [50:  20 August 1773, Teignmouth journal 1773; Burney, Early journals, vol. 1, 297.] 

Walking enabled her to possess the landscape and the scenery. Indeed, she wrote that they went out so much, ‘either Walking or in the whiskey, that we have hardly any Time’ (to study Italian, which is what they had set out to do);[endnoteRef:51] walking became the main purpose of their days. It combined the pleasure of bodily exercise and the feeling of good health with the sensory pleasures that the walkers’ space provided. [51:  Ibid.] 

For one of the greatest walkers of her time, Elizabeth Carter, ‘walking’ was ‘a happiness’.[endnoteRef:52] Much of this happiness rose from what she saw and reflected upon while she walked—in other words, from having spatial experiences when walking. This was interlinked with the bodily experience of walking, the movement itself, and with the experience of being able to walk, of being fit enough. These were intertwined experiences that were essentially about being alive and immersing oneself in one’s environment. It was preferable that this environment was also a delight to watch. [52:  Mrs Carter to Miss Talbot, Deal, 20 December 1765 in A series of letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, vol. 3, 132.] 

Conclusions
In what I have argued here, I have shown the importance of walking in the eighteenth century as conducive to health as well as sociability and entertainment. I have demonstrated that elite women’s walking was an everyday activity, not only in the country or small towns, but also in noisy and polluted London. Countless women were committed to their walks as ways of maintaining their health, their happiness and, through this exercise which was considered healthy, their looks as well.
I have suggested that the health benefits of walking were not confined to the countryside but were also incorporated into the urban experience. This incorporation was considered ever more necessary after the London Season was established as a ‘must’ for elites. In smaller towns this was achieved through the development of formal or informal walks on the outskirts of towns, easily accessible to the town-dweller. Medium-sized towns eagerly followed the fashions of London in building gardens and amusement parks. But London led the way. Urban walks and walking were especially incorporated into the development of the city itself through the development, cleaning and better control of its dozens of squares, pleasure gardens and parks. While some royal parks in London had been open to the public since the sixteenth century, in the eighteenth century they were especially fashionable spaces for promenades and developed further for these purposes. Perhaps more on the pretence of creating space for exercise were the famous amusement parks such as Ranelagh, which offered, during their heyday, enjoyable possibilities for indoor walking, concerts and slightly sinful night promenades, among other pleasures, for a fee. Commercial or not, walking was a central element in urban life, both in smaller towns and in the metropolis; women’s walking was one of the most important incentives to improve city infrastructure, to create semi-rural spaces within the bustling city. Walking was an important way to ensure a continuum between town and country life. It was certainly one of the strongest elements combining the two seasons of the year: the one half spent in town, and the other in the country. In both, one needed fresh air, exercise and the added pleasures of good scenery and company derived from the act of walking.
Notes