Douglas Goldring's the Tramp: An Open Air Magazine (1910–1911) and Modernist Geographies

Goldring makes no bold statements about, for example, 'the functions of the arts in the Republic' as Ford does in The English Review.6 His signed editorial intervention is limited to a notice in September 1910, outlining in general terms a broadening of focus and a desire to 'widen the circle of readers' in the second volume of the magazine; and he lists 'the open-air man, the artist, the literary man and the general reader' as his ideal audiences.7 Critics who have explored the magazine in any depth have done so in terms of the work of individuals-specifically a single author's or artist's engagement with modernity, his/her credentials as a modernist-rather than in terms of the magazine as a project in its own right. [...]in an investigation of painter Augustus John's 'equivocal status as a "modern"'-John was not a contributor to the magazine-Lisa Tickner uses The Tramp as evidence that John's infamous tramping proclivities were not purely nostalgic or an anomaly, but rather very much in vogue in John's time.8 In a discussion of the modernism of the work of Welsh poet and 'Super-Tramp' W.H. Davies, a contributor to the first four issues of The Tramp, Peter Howarth distinguishes the work of this '"real tramp"' (Davies cited in Howarth), the 'simplicity' (an authorial lack of control, a dissonance) of which makes him a modernist, from the amateur 'self-remaking, with something of Nietzsche's love of inner strength and forgetfulness' of his fellow The Tramp contributors.9 And in his book Before Modernism Was, a book about 'the why of modernism,' Geoff Gilbert argues that to read Henry James's 'The Jolly Corner' and Wyndham Lewis's The Wild Body stories 'across the linked spaces of The English Review and The Tramp is to face the full difficulty of thinking about "modernism" as defined by a set of common properties.'10 Following these critics in identifying a modernist aspect to Goldring's magazine, my argument is that although The Tramp has a surface engagement and topical focus on what would seem to be a nostalgic and anti-modernist set of issues, its treatment of the outdoors and wayfaring through the mostly English countryside offers a distinctly modernist re-imagining of these places and activities. [...]December's 'The Tramp on Wheels' is followed by an advertisement for the Lanchester: 'The Ladies' Ideal Car.'30 Like the celebrations of the car, the commercial quality of the magazine in general, advertising for precisely those hotels and guidebooks one