Why Hermsprong Walks: Class and Independence in Robert Bage’s Radical Novel

Henry Addington on horseback, the conventional form of travel for a gentleman of rank in late eighteenth-century Britain. Against this backdrop, Hermsprong’s habit of travelling everywhere on foot becomes radical. (Henry Addington, Later 1st Viscount Sidmouth by Francis Wheatley (1747—1801). Via Wikimedia Commons.)

One of the most curious features of Robert Bage’s Hermsprong is also one of the easiest to overlook: Hermsprong walks everywhere. To a modern reader this might seem unremarkable. But to readers in the 1790s it would have been startling.

In late eighteenth-century Britain, the way a person travelled signalled their social rank. Gentlemen travelled on horseback, by carriage, or by stagecoach. Walking long distances was associated with labourers, soldiers, or the poor. It suggested someone without servants, without a horse, and therefore without consequence. Bage makes this social coding explicit in the novel itself. When Hermsprong remarks in Volume I, Chap. VI, that he has “trod much ground”, Doctor Blick immediately presses him on the point:

“Trod, sir! Is that term proper? I presume you did not travel on foot?”
“Chiefly so, Sir.”
“On foot, Sir!”
“On foot.” 

The reaction is revealing. The simple admission that he travels on foot instantly alters how Blick perceives him. The narrator even remarks in the following paragraph that this fact could not fail “to abate something of the respect which the gentleman’s dress and manner might have produced.” In other words, Hermsprong’s walking disrupts the quick social judgements people rely upon.

The same tension appears again in Volume II, Chap. VI, when Hermsprong tells Mr. Glen that he must reach London within a few days. Glen naturally assumes he will take a faster and more respectable form of transport, suggesting that the journey could be made quickly. Hermsprong responds simply:

“On foot?” said Hermsprong.
“Surely, Mr. Hermsprong, you cannot think of walking?”
“Oh, man of prejudice, why? in what other way can I travel with equal pleasure?” 

Glen’s reaction reflects the assumptions of polite society: “Pleasure! pleasure in England is not attached to the idea of walking. Your walks we perform in chaises.” Hermsprong’s reply captures his philosophy in miniature: “I pity you for it. For myself, I choose not to buy infirmity so dear.” For him, walking is not a sign of poverty but of freedom. It keeps him independent, physically vigorous, and socially unencumbered.

And Bage emphasises that this behaviour is not occasional eccentricity but a defining trait. When the landlord of the Golden Ball recounts Hermsprong’s arrival in the neighbourhood, the detail is striking: Hermsprong himself arrives on foot, while his servant follows later on horseback with the luggage. The image neatly reverses the expected hierarchy. The gentleman walks; the servant rides. To contemporary readers this inversion would have been both comic and provocative. Hermsprong refuses to signal status in the usual way. He will not advertise wealth, rank or consequence through the outward rituals of polite society.

This refusal is precisely what makes him difficult for figures such as Lord Grondale and Dr. Blick to understand. Their world depends on visible hierarchies. Hermsprong behaves like a gentleman in conversation and conduct, yet refuses the external markers that normally confirm the role. For more open-minded characters, however, the effect is very different. The Sumelin family and others respond to Hermsprong not with suspicion but with curiosity and admiration. His indifference to the performance of status suggests authenticity, a quality that polite society often lacks.

Seen in this light, Hermsprong’s walking is not a trivial eccentricity but a small act of social rebellion. It reflects the wider moment in which Bage was writing. By the 1790s Britain was witnessing the rise of an educated and prosperous middle class—merchants, manufacturers and professionals who did not derive their authority from inherited rank. Many of these readers were turning to the novel as a form of intellectual and social commentary. Bage’s fiction speaks directly to them.

Hermsprong’s independence from the rituals of rank embodies a new ideal of character: one grounded not in birth or display, but in reason, integrity and personal freedom. Even something as simple as walking can become, in the world of the novel, a challenge to the assumptions of an entire society. What appears at first to be a small eccentricity is in fact a quiet challenge to the assumptions of an entire social order.

In Hermsprong, even something as simple as walking can be radical. It is also part of something larger. For just as Hermsprong refuses the visible markers of rank, the novel itself refuses to defer to the place where such hierarchies were most powerfully enforced: London.

Volume I of Hermsprong is published on 12 May.

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