The Literature Network - Too many detours A celebrated London walker is less than sure-footed when following the poet John Clare, finds Neil Powell

Too many detours A celebrated London walker is less than sure-footed when following the poet John Clare, finds Neil Powell

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20051002
Author:Neil Powell

ENGLISH WRITERS have always been captivated by roads. Literary travellers such as Daniel Defoe, William Cobbett and J.B. Priestley turned their journals into memorable books; novelists from Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews onwards used the road (and its strange encounters) to shape their fiction. John Clare's three-day walk from the asylum at High Beach in Epping Forest, where he had been a patient for four years, to his Northamptonshire home in 1841 was altogether different: not an "escape'', since he hadn't been confined and no one tried to recapture him, but a laborious, hallucinatory ...

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Too many detours A celebrated London walker is less than sure-footed when following the poet John Clare, finds Neil Powell

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