In both Bronte’s Villette (1853) and Dickens’ The Old Curiosity shop(1840) walking becomes a rite of passage that characterises the subject in terms of his/her perception. The subject is valued through that ability to perceive as both the participant and the observer through the walk. As opposed to the vantage point in the sitting room (in a novel like Mansfield Park), the walk in the countryside presents its subject not only allows observation but also introspection. In contrast to the notion of privacy that usually allows the woman of letter to introspect and observe, in Villette it is the outdoors, the walk in the countryside that both make her an object of thought and gives her the spatial freedom to contemplate. The park/garden becomes the intermediary space, located between the open spatial politics of the street and the closed interiors of the domestic household. It allows for new kinds of alliances, and becomes a site for a new kind of social gathering. The social setting of the walk mobilises the strict distinctive spaces of the interior and the exterior, becoming an indicator of a new kind of social interactivity. The walk not only subverts notions of interior and exterior in terms of the domestic household, it also fashions a kind of homelessness that necessitates the walk. Unlike Lucy Snowe who comes back from the ‘walk’ into the comforts of an interior, Nell’s relentless walks lead her away from that domestic space, creating an unfulfilled yearning. The endless walks not only characterise the subjects in terms of action and time, the ‘close eternal streets’ of London become a death-like process that characterises the city itself.