Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

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I Thoroughly enjoyed listening to the authors nocturnal adventures and his excellent descriptions of all of the creatures who venture out at night. In many works he is easy to miss, as he tends not to be a central or consistent figure, but rather one who skulks in the margins. The fore and afterword and "regular" history bits were quite interesting but I found myself flagging hard during the more literary analyses.

I have seen a moon-bow, an arch of white light in the heavens; I have watched hares box in a star-charmed, wave-earthed plough field; I have learned our human insignificance by gazing up at the cosmic sprawl of the Milky Way. Matthew Beaumont offers an alternative account of the city streets through the prism of its historical ‘nightwalkers’, uncovering hidden topographies of nocturnal London. Similarly, this book’s own title and Beaumont’s discussion personify the night as it haunts London in perpetuity. Another highlight was the final two chapters, which reveal that Charles Dickens’s frequent night walks were an essential aspect of his writing method (in an apparently similar way to Haruki Murakami’s use of long-distance running to sustain his writing).

Lewis-Stempel describes vividly what he has sensed, seen, and heard during his night rambles, and how this is a markedly different experience from wandering in daylight hours.

It means, as others have commented, that it is pretty much a male history - the women who occupied London's streets at night not generally producing much poetry and prose. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Beaumont’s book is an ecstatic celebration of our tendency to invest the night with all our fears, guilt, and desires. I started the project from a place of rage, after reading an extract from John Lewis-Stempel’s new book of the same name.Oscillates between interesting insights and thoughtful passages, and feeling like you're on a walk with someone continually implying how clever they are, thanks to a combination of poetry selections and an adept application of assonance. Sorry Mr Beaumont, this wasn't my bag, although I did learn some new bizarre words such as obnubilate! So this book is essentially a literary review of all things nocturnal in written form from around the 1300's or so through to the 19th century. 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. He is at his most interesting when discussing changing societal attitudes and lexicographical developments (did you know "pedestrian" was used in its "metaphorical" sense before its "literal" one?

The largest change had come slightly earlier, with the introduction of street lighting during (appropriately) the Enlightenment.Beyond the first two chapters, the majority of the book tends to focus on nightwalkers from the upper end of the social scale, who are referred to as ‘noctambulants’: those nightwalkers whose pedestrianism was of an optional, rather than necessary, nature.