How long would it take for a young lady in victorian England to walk this distance?

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A young lady from the Victorian era would not walk that distance. A young lady would be driven that distance in the family coach.

If the young lady is running away from her family, or other circumstances force her to travel the distance on foot and unassisted, my hiking experience says it would take about four hours, and she'd limp into town with sore, blistered feet, complaining about having just made the longest walk in her life.

Now, ignoring the "young lady" criteria and assuming a generic "adult from the countryside", two hours each way is a reasonable estimate for that trip. A twenty-minute mile is a comfortable walking pace for an adult on level terrain and an established path, and someone who isn't a young lady or a city-dweller would be in shape to maintain that pace for several hours.

(Note that planning for "a couple hours in town" would be unusual. The length of the trip means she would likely be planning to spend all day in town, taking care of as many tasks as possible.)

Upvote:2

Normal walking speed for a man is something like three miles an hour.

For a "lady," with a long dress and cumbersome shoes, it's more like two miles an hour. And that's at a fairly brisk pace, but I've seen a "Victorian" lady (born in 1896) walk at that pace in the 1960s (in her "young old" years).

So the lady could walk six miles to town, in three hours, spend an hour or two in town, and walk back "later" the same day, in a seven to eight hour period.

Upvote:10

Well, we do have an example of a literary heroine of that age who walks about half that distance in a morning's walk: Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Chapter VII) walks three miles, across fields and stiles, the day after a heavy rain, to be able to reach her sister when she has fallen ill while visiting the Bingleys.

The time it takes is not seen as particularly long - when she arrives, she finds the Bingley household assembled at breakfast. While the Bingleys are likely eating more fashionable late in the morning, there is plenty of time left in the day. Elizabeth was also apparently planning on walking back the same afternoon, and does not show any signs of exhaustion.

If there is a decent road from wherever your young lady is starting to town, I would not consider six miles as some extraordinary feat, provided she is in general good health and used to taking some exercise.

While Pride and Prejudice is set in decidedly pre-Victorian times, whether this would be a socially acceptable way of travelling depends very much on the family in question. The question says that they are "well off", but this does not really tell us much of their social status, or that the family necessarily would have been able to afford to keep a coach, or even a horse that she could use. Elizabeth's walk is seen as eccentric, but not really socially damning.

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