ABSTRACT
Literary texts aid understanding of individuals’ perspectives on the geographical mobilities of modernity. Pedestrianism in George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) is driven by financial need, but becomes a means of exploring city experiences. Gissing’s writing combines an often violent rejection of urban modernity with an extreme sensitivity to material details. These include distances and amounts of money. Hurry in Ryecroft, a fictionalized memoir, characterizes the youth of the protagonist as seen by him in retrospect from a leisured position much later in life. Ryecroft the character’s own proximity to the end of his life itself puts him in the position of hurrying towards his grave, a sort of hurry that, instead of the details of 1880s London, draws on reflective classical literature, for example by Horace. This chapter looks at Ryecroft’s urban mobility through the lens of literary urban studies, asking how literary scholars can best draw on developments in sociology and human geography. This detailed exploration of Ryecroft relates it to literary predecessors but also remains close to the specific topographies of London between 1880 and 1900. The chapter assesses the role of cultural conservatism and reactionary attitudes in modernity, which frequently manifest themselves in a self-contradictory anti-urban stance.
