Wednesday, January the 29th, 2014
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It is almost impossible to read a memoir or biography of a Victorian writer without coming upon the inevitable walking statistics. Even [John Stuart] Mill, that effeminate “logic-chopping machine”… walked fifteen miles three days before his death at the age of sixty-seven, a modest record compared with [Leslie] Stephen's grandfather, who celebrated his seventieth birthday by walking twenty-five miles to breakfast, then to his office, and home again the same day. Fifty miles a day was about the average for the “Sunday Tramps” organised by Stephen.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1968)