Over the summer I read an amazing book  by Judith Flanders, called The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London.

This has always been one of my favorite historical periods, maybe because so many of the books I read as a kid were centered in London—starting with A Little Princess, and E. Nesbit’s books, Sherlock Holmes, and, as I became a teenager, anything by Dickens, Wilkie Collins, P.G. Wodehouse, etc etc. I became obsessed with seeing London, but I was from a big, middle class family, and the farthest we got was Martha’s Vineyard.

I finally managed to travel there after my sophomore year of college. I decided to take a year off and go live there. I waitressed all summer and into the fall, and then landed a job working for a Member of Parliament, for a very small monthly wage.

Flanders points out that in London (and elsewhere), walking was the most common form of locomotion throughout the nineteenth century (26). By midcentury, ¾ of a million Londoners were walking back and forth to work—not just the working classes, she says, but middle class and even wealthy people thought nothing of it. She reminds us of the walkability of London, which reminded me that most mornings, I walked to work to save on bus fare. I set out from my house (a bedroom within a larger flat that I found by a small miracle) in Holland Park, walking along Kensington High Street to Knightsbridge to Hyde Park Corner and then through the park to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Google maps tells me it was about 3 ½ miles.

I travelled a well-trodden path. Flanders talks about the steady stream of pedestrians, “a thick black line, stretching from the suburbs into the heart of the City; every evening the black line reversed…” (24)