Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

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A lot of interesting facts and details about London - esp in the 16th and 17th centuries, but all of it well hidden behind his impenetrable thicket of politicized opinion. In some ways he was hoping to achieve in fiction what he had already spent many hours doing in person. As a night walker, nature lover and fan of Lewis Stempel's writing, this was always going to satisfy, though the shortness of the chapters ensures that it feels a little 'bitty' and doesn't flow as well as his longer books tend to. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The joy of Beaumont’s book is the way it illuminates both literature and urban politics through the splendors and panics of their nighttime journeys.

Obviously aimed at the intellectual and students of early English literature, the writing is ponderous and would not hold the attention of persons with a casual interest in the history of London. There just wasn't enough of this book to give it 5 stars; the writing is beautiful and accomplished and conveys a true love of the countryside and natural world, I also enjoyed the author's choice of poems.

In addition to the differing treatments of rich and poor Londoners for whom night-time conditions were distinctly different, Nightwalking also reveals the divisions between the perceived activities of each gender. Rich in imagery and idea, this is the kind of book that makes readers ask questions and explore further. Beaumont's ambition, however, is to go beyond his literary expertises into a broader cultural examination of walking by night, with slightly less success. In a similar manner, Nightwalking uncovers the forgotten landmarks of London and unravels the urban transformations undergone over the centuries. As Beaumont argues, the night obscures the visual realm that distracts from the subterranean realities of the land.

For instance, Marble Arch now stands on the site where up to 60,000 public hangings were undertaken over a six-hundred-year period. It’s not the subject he’s writing about that he wants us to be impressed with, but his own intelligence. As Virginia Woolf explained in her 1930 essay “Street Haunting”, to be in the streets when we have no real business being there allows us to shrug off the usual rules of life.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. But in addition to these figures, Beaumont points out, London’s streets belong to the nightwalker, a “modern antihero” who spends the hours of darkness pacing through the city, whether this is because he is seeking himself (almost all the figures Beaumont discusses are male) or fleeing from himself. So erzählt er nicht nur die Geschichte seiner Wanderung, sondern auch die anderer Menschen, die er bewundert. Beaumont comments that in the title of Dickens’s ‘Night Walks’, ‘night’ might be read as either an adjective or a noun. This is a dense book; but consider that it's packed with facts and excerpts from historical records and various literary works.