Dr Alison O'Byrne publishes new book on eighteenth century London

Posted on 23 January 2025

Warm congratulations to Alison O'Byrne on the publication of her book, The Art of Walking in London: Representing the Eighteenth-Century City, 1700–1830.

In her new book, Alison O'Byrne explores a variety of perspectives on London during the long eighteenth century. Her book considers how walking made possible the various surveys and tours that characterized accounts of the capital, examining how walking in the city's streets and promenades provided subject matter for writers and artists. Engaging with a wide range of material, the book ranges across and investigates the various early eighteenth-century works that provided influential models for representing the city, descriptions of the promenade in St. James's Park, accounts of London that imagine the needs and interests of tourists, popular surveys of the cheats and frauds of the city uncovered on a ramble through London, and comic explorations of the pleasures and pitfalls of urban living produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Find out more about the book via this blog post.

Praise for the book:
‘O'Byrne reconstructs pedestrianism as a spatial practice with specific codes and unique ways of seeing. Elegantly written, well-researched, and highly engaging, her study engages with a range of fascinating materials in multiple genres to open up new perspectives on the changing social dynamics of city walking in the eighteenth century.'- Thomas Keymer - Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman University Professor of English, University of Toronto

‘O'Byrne's engaging interdisciplinary study reconstructs eighteenth-century poetics of walking in a range of genres, reading classics such as Gay's Trivia alongside spy books, pseudo-guides, and visual aids, from street characters, sites, and encounters to the ‘diagonal mirrour' that reorders urban attractions as a three-dimensional optical illusion for the armchair traveller.'- Luisa Calè - Reader in Romantic and Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Culture, Birkbeck, University of London