The Art of Walking in London
Representing the Eighteenth-Century City, 1700–1830

A stimulating examination of how walking made possible the differing representations of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London.

Alison O'Byrne (Author)

9781009524032, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 January 2025

282 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.55 kg

'O'Byrne's engaging interdisciplinary study reconstructs eighteenth-century poetics of walking in a range of genres, reading classics such as Gay's Trivia alongside spy books, pseudo-guides, and visual aids, from street characters, sites, and encounters to the 'diagonal mirrour' that reorders urban attractions as a three-dimensional optical illusion for the armchair traveller.' Luisa Calè, Reader in Romantic and Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture, Birkbeck, University of London

Exploring a variety of perspectives on London during the long eighteenth century, this study considers how walking made possible the various surveys and tours that characterized accounts of the capital. O'Byrne examines how walking in the city's streets and promenades provided subject matter for writers and artists. Engaging with a wide range of material, the book ranges across and investigates the various early eighteenth-century works that provided influential models for representing the city, descriptions of the promenade in St. James's Park, accounts of London that imagine the needs and interests of tourists, popular surveys of the cheats and frauds of the city uncovered on a ramble through London, and comic explorations of the pleasures and pitfalls of urban living produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Convincing and engaging, O'Byrne demonstrates the fundamental role played by walking in shaping representations of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century city.

Introduction: negotiating a city shower
1. Mobility and spectatorship in the early eighteenth-century city: the art of walking the streets of London
2. Promenading the mall in St. James's park
3. Imagining the stranger: the tourist in the streets of eighteenth-century London
4. London spied
5. Metropolitan pleasures and grievances: reimagining the art of walking the streets of London
Conclusion: 'Much has chang'd since Trivia trod with Gay'
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]