The Regent's Park represents an effort to naturalize a princely national order that in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) resounds in the regular ringing of Big Ben. Originally conceived as a park closed to the common public with two rings of ornate homes for the stately, pedestrians did not have access until 1835, and then for just two days a week. Th us, the original conception of the park rests on the exclusion of the common public by an encircled and celebrated state. Woolf's Flush learns “that there is no equality among dogs: there are high dogs and low dogs” over a summer in The Regent's Park. Likewise, the characters of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway walk their ordered daily routines with the clock tolling their hours: “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable” (4). The risk is a modern mechanized (or habitual) movement according to a centralized state that compartmentalizes time and space for its class–stratified citizens. Of course, in Mrs. Dalloway the hour, the past, is revocable: it is remembered, revised, and relived for Septimus Smith and Mrs. Dalloway, most especially. Nevertheless, the characters submit to a kind of containment, startled out of it from time to time by the backfiring automobile or the smoking plane. Inventions, normally taken as a sign of progress and futurity, misfire the past into the present. This apparent need to shock a citizen into an even temporary remembrance of the war and its eff ects fuels Woolf's critique of a post–war England. At the heart of this critique is Septimus Smith—a man who can no longer contain the uncontainable, and whose boundaries between self and object, body and mind, are anything but stable.

In Septimus Smith's first scene in The Regent's Park, the leaves “beckoned” him; they're “alive” (22). He feels “the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body” (22). He hears “the sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling” (22).