The Art of Walking in London

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-009-52403-2
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 282 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 544 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Byrne, Alison

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über Autor(innen)

O'Byrne, Alison
Alison O'Byrne is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of York. She has published widely on representations of the city in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She is co-editor (with Jim Watt) of Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).