"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night," wrote the poet
Rupert Brooke. 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. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative
history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on
the streets when the sun's down. 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.
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.
We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a
balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a
place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent,
where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets.
With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a
captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at
night and the people they meet.
