The Art of Walking in London

Representing the Eighteenth-Century City, 1700–1830

Alison O'Byrne

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009523998
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Negotiating a City Shower
• Chapter 1 Mobility and Spectatorship in the Early Eighteenth-Century City: The Art of Walking the Streets of London
• Chapter 2 Promenading the Mall in St James’s Park
• Chapter 3 Imagining the Stranger: The Tourist in the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London
• Chapter 4 London Spied
• Chapter 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