rejoice in bad weather because the roads are empty.^39 The renter of a gypsy
caravan ‘casts aside all conventions’ and ‘can laugh at rain and storm...
Not for him are the cares of rates or taxes, coal bills, rent, and the hundred
and one minor worries that the unfortunate householder is heir to... he
can snap his fingers at the trammels of modern life, and like the Arab, can
pitch his camp wheresoever it pleases him.’^40 Needless to say, he certainly
could not pitch his camp wherever it pleased him, as the continually
evicted, rent-paying, coal-buying gypsies of the day knew only too well,
but this conflation of physical with social freedom is fairly consistent.
Because the journey is everything to the ideal reader ofThe Tramp, its hero
is separated from origin and destination, and while suspended is given the
chance to become someone else for a while, or to find some Romantic
original self set apart from ordinary social life. Arthur Ransome preferred to
tramp abroad, for ‘at home, he can only half-escape’. If the tramp is a
gentleman he can never disguise it, ‘and if he is not, the country folk will
find him out’. But abroad, ‘nothing is expected of him except strangeness’.^41
Another writer complained, ‘It is not enough that a man has an empty
stomach and two aching legs; he must also have a name and a native town
and a province, and a profession, and many other things which he goes on
the tramp in order to forget.’^42 Likewise Bart Kennedy: ‘The thing is to
walk and to forget everything but the walking and the delights of the
road.’^43 Such deliberate forgetfulness is also important to the amateur
tramp because it allows access to the normally hidden interior life. Lady
Margaret Sackville advises the tramp to take few books with him:
They belong to the world of self-consciousness, and are too emphatically links
with ordinary life. Even poetry books should be abandoned... such poems as
are good for him will come bubbling up of their own accord to the surface of the
wanderer’s mind... only such things as are wholly necessary should be taken
(and if possible not these even!) so that for once entire freedom may exist from
the tyranny of belongings!^44
AlthoughThe Tramp’s theme might seem a gift to him, Edward
Thomas contributed no walking articles, only a sketch of city crowds,
dream-stories and parables. (A periodical of the same era calledThe Open
Roaddescribes its interests as ‘Religion, Psychology, Sociology, Diet and
Hygiene’, and does not concern itself with travel at all.) Throughout,
tramping is far more than walking; it is a kind of social or personal
therapy, an updating and expansion of the Wordsworthianconcordia
discorsbetween man and inner landscape, in the footsteps of Stevenson,
Leslie Stephen and Belloc.^45 The magazine itself is an alliance of supposed
The simplicity of W. H. Davies 139