ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a flourishing area of nineteenth-century sports: walking or pedestrianism. It focuses on a six-day walking contest in Madison Square Garden in 1884 and its coverage in popular newspapers. This race, in which competitors walked repeatedly round a track for as many hours as they could endure, spectacularised an everyday activity, making it productive. I analyse the ambivalent status of walking as work, comparing professional, competitive walking with the burgeoning discourse of amateur walking for self-improvement, and demonstrate how walking unpicks dichotomies between sport and art, and professional and amateur. For the competitors, the walking contest was a literal and figurative forum for circulation, in which many hoped to establish celebrity personas. As they became unofficial representatives of nations, races and ethnicities, the walkers’ identities were spectacularised and commercialised. Yet part of the appeal of the gruelling competition was its presentation of bodies in extreme and precarious states. The race’s progress saw the weary pedestrians become emblematic of humanity’s decline, expressing anxious nineteenth-century entanglements of masculinity, racialised identities, industrialisation, immigration and labour. Like bridge jumping, durational walking contests were understood in terms of sacrifice: as negotiations with sacredness, as well as frivolous entertainments.
