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Chapter 2 - Promenading the Mall in St James’s Park
Alison O'Byrne, University of York
Book:

The Art of Walking in London

Published online:

19 December 2024

Print publication:

23 January 2025, pp 64-107
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Summary

Chapter 2 examines how the Mall in St James’s Park – the prime location for promenading in eighteenth-century London – became a key site for writers and artists who turned a humorous eye on the social ambitions of London’s middling sorts. Here, men and women congregated “to see and be seen, to censure and be censured”, as one account put it, and comic accounts of the promenade frequently describe the Mall as a battleground in which new, commercial wealth clashes with forms of inherited status. The literary and visual satires examined here respond to concerns about the blurring of distinctions by suggesting, albeit wishfully, that attempts by the middling sorts to imitate those higher up the social scale are always transparent, and true rank and status always reveals itself.