Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

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and some time thinking about where I would have stood vis a vis the enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment. It goes on like this and was just frustrating because the sentences were so bad - how did an editor not sort this? In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. Its exploration of London’s nightwalkers begins in Shakespeare’s walled city, in which there was no good reason for anyone but the night watch to be out; it proceeds through the bohemian period, in which the noctavagant are actively resisting the strictures of clock-watching artisans.

I struggled to get into this book, then I struggled to get through it and I struggled to absorb the information within it. It was also fascinating to discover the interactions between Dickens’s night-long wanders and his fictional writing, such as the lengthy walk between Kent and central London undertaken by Pip in Great Expectations.The books concludes in Dickens’ insomniac walks to his country home, tortured as he was by some pre-Freudian psychology that would only be drawn out by the noirs and crime novels of the mid-20th century (outside Beaumont’s purview). Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant.

which is always accompanied by how we view people who've wandered the night over the centuries and of the night itself. There are city people who have never seen the stars or known the comfort of being wrapped by night's soft wings. Beaumont uses examples of literature from different periods throughout London’s history - from Shakespeare to Dickens - to show how these poets and authors - in their work and their lives - reflected these changes in society.That's been my problem with Lewis-Stempel's work ever since The Running Hare (2016): he publishes too much, too often, whereas his books would be so much better if he saved up his material and selected the best of the best.

Rather than a history shown through the lens of literature, he makes this a literary critique that simply uses history as a loose excuse to show off his own knowledge. Of the four books I've read about walking around England after dark*, this was the best written but the least substantial. Rich in imagery and idea, this is the kind of book that makes readers ask questions and explore further. Occasionally it takes on the form of a skulking fox, but otherwise it remains full of mystery and a vague sense of threat. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.I mean, when did you last think about how much public street lighting must have fundamentally changed public life?

I appreciated the Marxist analysis of both the history and literature included in the book and I thought it contributed to his argument. In Nightwalking, Matthew Beaumont, co-director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, has written an ambitious and erudite sequel to his co-edited Restless Cities (2010), presenting the London night as a historical and literary phenomenon from the medieval period into the Victorian era. Since this book spends so much time on the social history of London, couldn't there have been some room for this aspect? Soon the popular understanding of “nightlife” had expanded to include entertainment as well as thieves lurking in the shadows.By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. In a similar manner, Nightwalking uncovers the forgotten landmarks of London and unravels the urban transformations undergone over the centuries. That said, the build up contributed to the pay off of the Dickens chapters, which knocked it out of the park. If nightwalking is a matter of going astray in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.