I wanted to love this book, but found the experience of reading it to be sort of a slog. I think part of the problem is that Beaumont is trying to do a whole lot here: he’s looking at the history of walking at night, mostly but not exclusively in London, from the early modern period through to Dickens, and he’s doing it mostly through a literary-history lens, but with bits of legal and social history, too. So it’s a long book, and a full book, and a lot of time is spent laying the foundation for the sections that felt, to me, like the most fully realized and strongest bits (the parts about the Romantics and about Dickens). Beaumont starts out by talking about the difference between “noctivagants” and “noctambulants,” or between “common” and “uncommon” nightwalkers, with the former being the poor or homeless and the latter being more privileged people, usually men, who walked the streets at night for reasons other than literal necessity—as a social activity, or as moral crusaders, or as a way to gather inspiration for their writing.
The book is divided into four sections, some of which I found more interesting than others. In Part One, Beaumont talks about the “common night walker” in English law and also in later colonial law—anyone who is out at night without being able to to provide a “good” reason for it in the eyes of the law. He talks about statutes on night walking as a way of policing the poor and marginalized, and also touches on how walking/nighttime is presented in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Part Two moves on to the eighteenth century, when more public illumination at night in cities, as well as the rise of urban capitalism, meant a more social city at night, with pleasure gardens and illuminated shop windows and also more artisans and other working poor people doing night work. I liked the bits here about “Trivia,” a 1716 poem by John Gay about walking in London, and about Ned Ward’s London Spy, neither of which I’d heard of before.
Part Three moves on to the Romantics, and I found this one of the stronger sections of the book, though I personally could have done with a bit less William Blake. Beaumont talks about how in this period, “walking became an end in itself,” and how “walking, for the Romantics, inscribed a coded rebellion against the culture of agrarian and industrial capitalism onto both the material surfaces of city and countryside—the streets, the roads, the footpaths—and their social relations” (228, 229). I was interested in the sections about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Wordsworth (though the latter’s walking was rather more rural than urban), and about John Clare, walking away from the asylum where he was a patient, and about Thomas De Quincey. I also really liked Part Four, which is mostly about Dickens (his personal night-walking habits and night-walking in his novels) but which also includes this great paragraph from an 1801 letter to Wordsworth by Charles Lamb, about why he likes London:
The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet-street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; [the very women of the Town;] the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles;—life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes—London itself a pantomime and a masquerade— all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life. (324)
Leave a Reply