Abstract
John ‘Walking’ Stewart (1747–1822) was a remarkable figure of the Romantic period, and one who has been almost entirely forgotten. In his seventy-five years, Stewart walked across most of the known world, tramping from India to England, detouring into Africa, travelling as far east as Russia and as far north as Lapland, and crossing the Atlantic to walk around North America. Along the way, he formulated an eccentric but fascinating philosophy, articulated in a slew of self-published books. Thomas De Quincey called him ‘a sublime visionary’ whose ‘mind was a mirror of the sentient universe’. This essay recovers some of Stewart’s key ideas from his writings while locating him in London, where he ended his days. The time is ripe to reassess Stewart’s writings because they speak to current aspirations to develop a global account of Romanticism, and to evolve a non-anthropocentric ontology. This essay therefore suggests how Stewart’s ideas resonate in the present.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 2015 [1948]. The Cost of Discipleship. Trans. R. H. Fuller. London: SCM Press.
[Brande, William]. 1822. The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart: Including His Travels in the East Indies, Turkey, Germany and America. London: E. Wheatley.
Cox, Jeffrey. 2014. Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Quincey, Thomas. 1823. Walking Stewart. London Magazine, VIII (September), 253–60. In: The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols. Ed. Greville Lindop, 2000–03, vol. 3: 132–42. London: Pickering and Chatto.
Gros, Frédéric. 2014. A Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso.
Grovier, Kelly. 1998. John Stewart and the Burying of Books in Wordsworth’s Prelude. Notes and Queries, 45: 189.
_____. 2005. ‘Shades of the Prison-House’: ‘Walking’ Stewart, Michel Foucault and the Making of Wordsworth’s ‘Two Consciousnesses’. Studies in Romanticism, 44: 341–66.
———. 2007. Dream Walker: A Wordsworth Mystery Solved. Romanticism, 13: 156–63.
_____. 2008. ‘Paradoxes of the Panoscope’: ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Making of Keats’s Ambivalent Imagination. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 52.
_____. 2012. No Visions. Review of Pamela Clemit, ed., The Letters of William Godwin, vol. 1. Times Literary Supplement, March 2.
Hazlitt, William. 1998. My First Acquaintance with Poets. In: The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, 9 vols. Ed. Duncan Wu, vol. 9: 95–109. London: Pickering and Chatto.
Jones, Ewan James. 2015. John ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Ethics of Motion. Romanticism 21: 119–31.
Pearce, William. 1793. Hartford Bridge: or, the Skirts of the Camp. London: T. N. Longman.
[Reynolds, John Hamilton]. 1822. ‘Walking Stewart’. London Magazine 6: 410–11.
Salt, Henry. 1891. Walking Stewart (A Sketch of an Eccentric Pedestrian). Temple Bar 93: 574–78.
Stewart, John. 1777. An Account of the Kingdom of Thibet: In a Letter from John Stewart to Sir John Pringle. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 67: 465–92.
_____. [1790]. The Apocalypse of Nature; wherein the Source of Moral Motion Is Discovered. London: J. Ridgway.
_____. 1790. The Revelation of Nature. London: for the author.
[Stewart, John]. 1790. Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, to Discover the Source of Moral Motion. London: for the author.
_____. 1794. The Tocsin of Britannia, with a Novel Plan for a Constitutional Army. London: for the author.
_____. 1794. Second Peal of the Tocsin of Britannia; or, Alarm Bell of Britons; with Plans of National Armament, and National Defence, Addressed to the British Yeomanry. London: for the author.
_____. 1795. The Revelation of Nature, with the Prophecy of Reason. New York: for the author.
_____. 1810. The Moral or Intellectual Last Will and Testament of John Stewart, The Traveller, the Only Man of Nature That Ever Appeared in the World, 2 vols. London: for the author.
_____. 1812. The Book of Nature: in the 7000th Year of Astronomical History from the Chinese Tables, and the First Day of Intellectual Life or Moral World. London: for the author.
_____. 1815. The Sophiometer: or, Regulator of Mental Power. London: for the author.
Symonds, Barry. 2004. ‘Stewart, John (1747–1822)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: University Press. Online edn.: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26494. Accessed 12 December 2018.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mole, T. (2020). Catching Up with Walking Stewart. In: Lennartz, N. (eds) The Lost Romantics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35546-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35546-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35545-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35546-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)