As his years of travel and pedestrianism come to an end, his favorite image of a mountain walker seduced the Brocken spectre (his own shadow projected on the morning mist) comes to stand for his revised belief that no degree of mobility and change, no degree of repetition of the anxieties and pleasures of arrival and departure, can ultimately do much to liberate one from the omnipresence of self.

Annihinatiing the present tense is also to remove the ground of stable selfhood, suspending the subject between difference and deferral, memory and anticipation. However much Coleridge may have yearned for secure anchorage in his personal life, there was a parallel and contrary need to remove himself from all localizing, defining associations and commitments, to re-experience what he calls (in reflecting on his passion for solitary travel) ‘a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, & comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me.’

The letters he [Coleridge] wrote on the tour convey vividly the energy and mobility of a young radical mind, discovering in movement through space a release from the defining social contexts of his life to date and a realm of physical difference onto which his quest for self-realisation could be mapped.

Only by repeatedly walking away can the typically Wordsworthian moral—that consolation for human suffering can be found in the peace and beauty of nature—be successfully incubated.

Despite the actuality of Goldsmith’s travels on the Continent, there is no interest in representing the mental transformations effected by a prolonged period of open-ended travel. Instead, having surveyed the natural advantages of a number of countries and the merits and demerits of their national cultures . . . his travels are found to have been vain and circular, since, given that ‘reason, faith and conscience’ are inalienable, mental and spiritual contentment can be found under any system of government: How small, of all that human hearts endure; That part which laws or kings can cause or cure; Still to ourselves in every place consigned; Our own felicity we make or find.

This enhanced mental excitation is possible because walking has a remarkable ability to purge the mind of its habitual, everyday clutter.

Picturesque travel, after all, is not heroic travel, which tests and validates the immutable being of the traveler; nor is it pilgrimage, which purifies the self by stripping it to its essentials; nor is it philosophical travel, which fashions an enlightened self through an agenda of rational exploration and accumulation of knowledge: it is instead, a form of travel which threatens to disorient the personality of the traveler, since, however much Gilpin promotes it as a rational amusement, it is at least as much an erotic adventure, and therefore shares the destabilizing power of those mutual identifications of subject and object that characterize all desire. One reason why the narratives of many pedestrian tourists seem such a montage of discourses is that the personae of the radical walker and the philosophical traveler and other more conventionally masculine selves are constantly being used to check and correct the sensuous excesses of the wandering lover of picturesque beauty.

So the constant train of fresh appearances encountered on a walk can endow the mind with its own illusion of novelty or rebirth, and a benign ‘despotism of the eye’ . . . can purge all consciousness of past selves and a narrowly defining past life.

That many pedestrian tourists embraced the discipline of observation and saw this as one legitimating purpose of their travels, is unquestionable.

As a result of the new importance of travel in furnishing fresh materials for observation, extending the boundaries of experience and knowledge, and cultivating the consciousness appropriate to empiricism, the ‘wandering philosopher of the ancient world became the humanist traveler of the Renaissance and the scientific traveler of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Experiential tourism is the form appropriate to those who are more irreparably alienated from their own cultures, and who seek meaning and authenticity in other places and other ways of life. Insofar as it is a quest for authenticity, it is akin to religious pilgrimage, but differs from it in that the tourist ‘remains a stranger even when living among the people whose ‘authentic’ life he observes, and learns to appreciate aesthetically.

The contrast between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary/exotic is the fundamental constituent of tourism, and that the desired realm of difference with non-touristic experience is frequently encountered, wittingly or unwittingly, via signs rather than through direct approach to some authentic otherness.

The ‘paradigmatic journeys’ of those who have founded religions or civilizations are retraced firstly by insiders and believers (pilgrims) and later by alienated consumers of cultural experiences (tourists).

[T]hey walked in a spirit of disenchantment with the social, economic and political order and their roles within it.

Since travel detaches the individual from their place in the social structure, and loosens the moorings of their culturally-constructed self, such ambiguities are perhaps more easily expressed in passage than in a settled condition.

Like many Romantic tourists, his is a variegated mind, and the pedestrian tour-structure allows him to bring his various interests into play successively, without the pretence of a fully unified sensibility.

With the main roads such powerful instruments of change, the walker’s decision to exploit his freedom to resist the imperative of destination and explore instead the lanes, by-roads and fieldpaths, could well be interpreted as an act of denial, flight or dissent vis-à-vis the forces that were ineradicably transforming British society.

[T]here may be more than a playful analogy to be drawn between the freedom to deviate—to ‘strike out’, to ‘turn to the right and the left’—in one’s route, on the one hand, and the kind of moderate social deviance or class nonconformism I have imputed to the first generation of pedestrians.

Walking affirmed a desired freedom from context, however partial, temporary or illusory that freedom might be: freedom from the context of their upbringing and education, the context of parental expectations and class etiquette, the context of a hierarchical and segregated society. Freedom, finally, from a culturally defined and circumscribed self. This promise was implicit in what Leed nicely calls the “indeterminacies of mobility”, which the pedestrian traveler enjoys to a greater extent than any other.

[T]here was an element of deliberate social nonconformism, of oppositionality, in the self-levelling expeditions of most early pedestrians. When many of them were freethinking undergraduates, as yet unincorporated into professional value systems and economic subservience . . . .

It is against this deeply-sedimented history of associating walking with indigence, necessity and fate, and in later centuries with the illicit freedom of the road and the deterrent force of the still-active vagrancy laws, that the early romantic pedestrians set out on their tours.

Coxe, Powell, Bowles and Frend are all cast well into the shadow as pedestrian travelers by one of the most colorful figures of the period, John “Walking” Stewart, best remembered through an affectionate essay by De Quincey. Born in London of Scottish parents, and educated at harrow and Charterhouse, Stewart spent nearly twenty years in the East Indies, initially working as a writer for the East India Company, but later as a successful general in the army for the Nabob of Arcot. Over this time he saved enough money to pursue his grand scheme of traveling the world – on foot – in search of moral truth, in the belief that ‘the man who knows all the most important nations of the globe becomes the paragon of his species, and the acme of intellectual energy.’