A Walk from London to John O'Groats

🔖 Burritt (1810-79) was an American diplomat, philanthropist and social activist. A prolific lecturer, journalist and writer on subjects such as opposition to slavery, temperance, and promoting brotherhood, he travelled widely in the US and Europe. In 1844 he founded a weekly paper, the Christian Citizen, and around this time emerged as the head of a group of radical pacifists within the American Peace Society. In 1846, disillusioned with how the Society was run, he travelled to England to lecture and it was here he launched the peace organization, the League of Universal Brotherhood. He had hoped to make a walking tour of Britain from one end to the other but could not find time once he became involved in peace movement activities, including organizing the first international congress of the Friends of Peace which convened in Brussels in 1848. In 1853 he returned to America where he took an interest in farming and agricultural methods and by 1856 was spending much time lecturing on abolition. In 1863 Burritt returned to England and in 1864 he was appointed US consul in Birmingham, England, by Abraham Lincoln, but was not reappointed to the post when Ulysses S Grant was elected in 1868. During this second stay in England he was able to make the long wallking tour he had contemplated 20 years earlier, and his account of the tour A Walk from Land's End to John O'Groats was published in 1864. Part of his purpose in writing the book was to report back to the neighbouring farmers back in New Britain, Conn., with whom he had formed an Agricultural Club, on farming methods and conditions in rural communities in England and Scotland.