Extract: The Burning Leg

Walkers, like lovers of literature, are driven by the urge to explore, and writers have blessed their fictional characters with itchy feet since the earliest of narratives. Walks found in novels, short stories and even drama can have a multitude of meanings. The Burning Leg: Walking Scenes from Classic Fiction (Hesperus Press) collects extracts from Dickens and Dostoevsky, Proust and Poe, Kipling, Kafka and many more to show imaginations time and again set in motion by the simple act of walking. The following introduction is by the anthology's editor, Duncan Minshull

Walkers have often wandered across the page. But accompanying their early efforts doesn’t reveal much about this simple and complex activity. In the Bible, say, or in various epics, mythology and folklore, people are named as walkers and that’s usually it – end of journey, end of story. Other journeys have allegorical meaning, where the road ahead, stretching to the horizon and full of hardship, reflects the course of one’s own travels through life: "Prepare to take The Road of Life", and so forth. Yet whoever went early – be it Christ through the wilderness, Xenophon’s marching men, Dante’s "roamer of the realms" – went without any examination. How, then, can readers appreciate the whys and wherefores of going on foot?

The conciseness and intimacy of the essay form helps. Its heyday was Victorian and Edwardian. It was used by author-walkers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Leslie Stephen and his daughter Virginia Woolf to describe rural and urban routes well trod and, more usefully, to delve into the physical, psychological and spiritual reasons for setting out. You’ll get some knicker-bockered bluster about what clothes to wear, the right boots, the right gait, and this can be skipped if too loud. Then, time-wise before and after the essayists, comes another type with insight – the poet-walkers. Among them are John Gay, John Clare and Edward Thomas, who record what it means (and feels) to put one foot in front of the other. Lots of poets walk to beat out a meter for their lines, and through the voices of their verses you can sense the rhythms of a journey just made.

But pedestrian literature needn’t stop here. Another group moves across the page, and it is steered into The Burning Leg. Walkers in novels and stories are placed on path, peak and street for the same reasons that preoccupy essayists and poets. Except, these walkers being fictional creations, their motivations are imbued with more dash and drama.

After one of his habitual hikes across London, Charles Dickens said, "Something always happens on taking a walk" – which is very true. The road is a stage. The road offers possibility. The world comes closer now. And perhaps Dickens wasn’t only referring to his own wanderings. He was suggesting to us: look how I can toy with the destinies of Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit, who are always out there, footing it.

But before Dickens and co, what of earlier pedestrians? There is Parson Adams, for instance. Put on an olde Englishe road by Henry Fielding to enjoy himself, he soon outdoes his carriage-bound friends with cries of "Aye, Aye, Catch Me If You Can" and heads for a grassy speck to wait. How good it was – still is – to snub the wheel. How good also to see and feel "the turf"; and his communing with nature echoes like-minded souls found in the novels of George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence. Though by the time Mark Twain sends a couple of over-packed trekkers up a track to see a sunset, we might think rural rambling goes too far. Thankfully high peaks and high comedy offer a welcome corrective.




Then in Edith Wharton’s The Reef, a figure strolls through Paris as if strolling through some lovely meadow with the Parson. For the sights and sounds that waylay George Darrow do so in bucolic fashion: he is at one with old bridges and old buildings. He is free to relax and reminisce, sink slowly back in time. But imagine if his footsteps were to segue into the London of Edgar Allan Poe… what a shock of the Victorian new would hit! From street level we follow a modern city in motion, with its familiar realities and paradoxes. Poe’s people move "like a tide", yet with "knitted brows", vital and anxious. Pavements are accessible, yet cracked and clogged; well lit, yet swathed in darkness. There is a sense of dislocation here that would defeat Darrow and it’s caught in the way everyone walks. Though they don’t walk. They bobble to and fro, jostle, bustle and reel. And from this tumult in Poe’s story "The Man of the Crowd" comes a classic figure – the flâneur. An indifferent meanderer, an observer of the scene, he leaves his café and newspaper behind to botanise on the asphalt. Amongst all these people, he is alone in life.

Loners fascinate on the fictional road, which might have something to do with snobbery and fear. Since the emergence of the novel only the poor and the criminal, and perhaps a poet or two beating out that meter, have had reason not to travel by horse, coach or mechanised carriage. Many dedicated walkers, especially single, are viewed as infra dig. Even  suspicious. When William Congreve’s Millamant, a dissenter ahead, says in The Way of the World, "I nauseate walking," she could be saying, ‘I nauseate walkers’ too, and speaks for many of her age and later. This of course gives writers tremendous scope, for they can turn these maligned types into memorable characters. Here for instance comes the Outsider: think of the Thomas Hardy novels that open with a stranger passing through. Here comes the Outcast: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Esther paces the pavements alone. And all those eccentrics, with their singular ambitions reflected in solitary journeys – one is "mesmerised" by a mountain peak and one will "hike" across his bed-chamber as if it’s the great beyond. They are restless souls in extremis, seeking some relief after setting off.

Another burning leg belongs to Elizabeth Bennett, who seeks relief from the confines of the drawing room, and the gossip. Outdoors she gets muddy and "glows" – Austen’s way of making her different to other women in Pride and Prejudice. More importantly, her excursions with somebody, with Darcy, will at last bring awareness – "Why is he so altered?" Writers use the aura of the loner; they also use social walks to get characters together and sort out their destinies. From the faintly suggestive passeggiatas described in Henry James to the highly charged strolls in D.H. Lawrence, it’s all happening. People walk and talk, and events take a turn. Later they take their own children out, and the ritual goes on.

Soon the light fades. And others start out. If the road is a stage, then the night-walkers invite everything to happen. Under artificial light, under the vagaries of gaslight rather than electric, the city changes. Meanwhile, the countryside is plunged into black, illumined by the moon and the stars, which have similar powers of transformation. Gerald and Gudrun in Women in Love might relish the dark of lovers’ lane, but for many such nocturnal excursions will end badly as melodrama and Grand Guignol take over. Dangers are made real or are projected by the individual. How else can it be for Cosette (pictured left) in Les Misérables? How – we ask – can Victor Hugo even do this, put a child on the road without a moon for company? She counts aloud to fortify her steps and somewhere she hopes – we hope – "a lighted candle" shines. We also recall that scene in Villette, when "moustachioed men" loiter close. How, too, can Charlotte Brontë put a young woman in a foreign town, off the boulevard, after dusk? But the truly dreadful nightwalk is young Goodman Brown’s, courtesy of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who fuses the external dangers of walking at night ("oh, that dark clad company") with inner dread ("the despair, the frenzy") – and does so brilliantly. It will stop you in your tracks. It will send Gerald and Gudrun home, too.

But back to those early accounts. No, they don’t examine why people walk; nor do they tell us how people walk. People just… walked. Yet novels and stories give us more. They show that identity is bound up with movement, and a character’s gait says much about them, which can be funny and poignant. Father Brown ponders the sound of footsteps near his room, before deciding they belong to a dubious sort. On a Maupassant stroll the women trail their skirts, the soldiers drag their sabres, ah yes – we get the symbolism there. Just as Hardy sends Mrs Yeobright to find her son, only for a stranger’s stride to change everything as she notes "the peculiarities of his walk". And a tramp in Richard Middleton’s tale realises he is new to the role after hearing, "I could tell by the way you walk. Perhaps you expect something at the other end. You’ll grow out of that."

And writers find choice words for catching movement. "Stamp!" is rather wonderful when used by Katherine Mansfield to show how Kezia tackles a stile, and after she succeeds we know she’ll stamp her way through life, too. Poe, as mentioned, sums up city congestion with a limited choice, whereas Twain’s Grand Tourers exalt in the Swiss air and make their ways expansively. Pushing and plunging, striding and swinging, loping, loafing and hurrying, and when desperate – slopping and clawing. Expansive yes, but it adds to a growing sense of parody – of two Americans in the Old World, two men small in the face of Nature. And whilst on the subject: where does that "burning leg" come from?

One of the final journeys in the anthology is made by a man and a dog along a snow-bound trail. It’s such a familiar duo, it’s surprising they haven’t shown up more often. Except the man isn’t very interesting. There are no compelling reasons for starting out, no affinity with nature or bond with his four-legged friend. Only the need to make camp before nightfall, otherwise the cold might kill him. So suspense mounts in Jack London’s story as we watch the man push on, with few words enriching the way he moves – just "plunging". In fact, he could have come from one of the early accounts, lacking as he does any appreciation of his actions or any psychological depth. What a way to sign off! But in between, here’s hoping the nature lovers and city types, the loners and couples, the nightwalkers and oddbods have enough in them to prove Dickens right. That something always happens on a walk, either in the head or on the road ahead. I hope you enjoy following them all.

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• Duncan Minshull, a producer for BBC Radio, has previously edited The Vintage Book Of Walking and writes widely on the subject of pedestrianism.