During the first acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic, soon after lockdown was first enforced, people living in cities learned to walk again. Confined to their homes, deprived of public transport, forbidden to travel to offices, pubs, restaurants and friends’ houses, people routinely took to the pavements in a desperate attempt to escape the airlessness and stasis of their everyday lives.
It felt good to put one foot in front of another. To stretch muscles that had stiffened, to uncoil limbs that had become uncomfortably cramped. To sense the ground beneath one’s feet. It was like stepping out of a spaceship. At home, as in some claustrophobic dream, the laws of gravity seemed to have been suspended. Outside, on a spring afternoon, with scarcely any traffic on the roads, it suddenly reimposed itself. For no more than half an hour, one finally felt alive again.
In those distant days, when everyone felt fairly confident they understood what the word “lockdown” meant, people sought freedom in their local streets. They sought confirmation that what they thought of as the real world, which had become more and more virtualised because of their dependence on smartphone and TV screens, was still there. It seemed to be.
There’s a short story by Ray Bradbury, called The Pedestrian, in which the protagonist, trapped in a dystopian society where people never leave their homes, roams a city in order to affirm his fast-diminishing sense of being a human being. In this future, everyone sits sedated in front of TVs in their living rooms watching comedies, detective movies and fatuous quizzes. But Bradbury’s hero, Leonard Mead, escapes each evening on his feet, relishing the sensation of freedom to be found in the empty streets.
Bradbury, a resident of LA who had witnessed a fatal road accident as a child, loathed cars and dreamed of replacing them with “whatever it takes to make pedestrians the centre of our society again, and cities worthwhile enough for pedestrians to live in”. So, it’s not surprising that Mead takes particular pleasure in the absence of traffic. He also rejoices in the traces of nature that have reappeared in the city, the “grassy seams” that have started to crack the concrete pavements for example. He examines a leaf he has caught in his hand and finds himself amazed at its “skeletal pattern” and its “rusty smell”.
During the national lockdown, as we took to the streets on our feet, we, too, thrilled to the presence of nature in our cities. We noticed things we’d long forgotten to see – intriguing buildings that had always been obscured by buses or the press of commuters; songbirds in trees blackened by decades of pollution; wildflowers and weeds in the grass verge beside roads that had until recently been choked with commuter traffic. Like Mead, we, too, learned to appreciate the leafiness of leaves. We felt reassured by the sheer “thisness” of the material world beyond the virtual one we inhabited in our bedrooms and living rooms.
That was then. Now, once again, we’re forgetting how to walk. In the current phase of the pandemic we’re quickly forgetting how to feel alive to the teeming, endlessly stimulating environment we inhabit. As we travel more and more routinely through the streets, our senses are becoming ever more blunted. People have stopped walking because of the simple pleasures it affords. Normal service has been resumed.
It’s time to relearn the lessons of the national lockdown before habits become too engrained to change again. This is the moment to do so, certainly, as we enter into the next phase of the pandemic, when those in areas of England under Tier 2 regulations are unable to see friends and family indoors. For many of us, walking with friends will provide our only respite from the solitude of home; our only form of sociability beyond the one-dimensional world of our screens.
For a brief moment, back in the spring, we stopped walking in the state of distraction to which, because of our relentless reliance on smartphones, we’ve become habituated. When we went for a walk, we actually looked at the city, processing its fascinating kaleidoscopic forms. And we actually looked at one another, too. It was frightening at times, because other people, like life itself, seemed so unpredictable. And because we’d almost lost the ability to read people’s faces. But it was exciting.
Today, like the commuters described by TS Eliot in The Waste Land, who march through London like the undead, our experience of the city has once more become pitifully impoverished: “Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” This is an exemplary description of “distracted walking”. But since the time Eliot was writing his poem, almost exactly a century ago, the problem of distracted walking has dramatically intensified.
In the early 21st century, people’s addiction to their smartphones, and the demands they face to be active producers and consumers at all times, means that every second or third pedestrian in the streets is gazing not at their surroundings but at their handheld screens. Instead of strolling the streets and exploring them when we walk back to the tube station after work, if only for five minutes, we send a final email, make a forgotten phone call.
We need to resist these habits that deplete our experience of the city. We need to learn to walk undistractedly. How? Start by turning off your phone. Once it’s off, consciously cultivate an attitude of active curiosity to your immediate environment. Don’t fix your eyes before your feet. Look up, look down, look around. Commit to noticing two or three things you’d never have noticed if you’d been looking at your phone. Savour them.
In its etymological sense, to commute means to transform. When we’re commuting through the streets let’s use this apparently inconsequential everyday experience to commute ourselves. Let’s begin to make pedestrians the centre of our society again, as Bradbury advised, and cities worthwhile enough for pedestrians to live in.
As cities enter new lockdowns, it's time to rediscover the joys of walking. By Matthew Beaumont. The Guardian , October 17, 2020.
'No Lost Steps' was commissioned as part of the 'Unfolding Maps' strand at ILFDublin, celebrating the memory of the late writer and cartographer Tim Robinson.
For Tim Robinson, walking was an act of deep engagement, and a way of generating the intensely detailed books that made his name. Writer Matthew Beaumont’s focus is urban: focusing on the literary history of walking and the significance of urban walking as a political act. His forthcoming book The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City is a brilliant new history of writers and walkers - including Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells - which asks: can you get lost in a crowd? And can we save the city – or ourselves – by taking to the pavement?
Ian Maleney is a writer and sound artist. His poignant debut essay collection Minor Monuments explores what binds us to others and to ourselves. Part memoir and part exploration, his essays unfold from the landscape of the Irish midlands. He is the founder of Fallow Media, an interdisciplinary publication for music, photography, and long-form writing on the internet.
International Literature Festival Dublin, October 23, 2020.
UCL Arts & Humanities, September 22, 2020.
In 2014, a BBC article bewailed “The Slow Death of” — wait. You fill in the gap. Where does your mind lead you, here in the depths of 2020? “The Slow Death of Democracy”? “The Climate”? “Your Savings”? “Communal Life”?
No; the headline lamented “The Slow Death of Purposeless Walking” (awe-struck italics mine). What a time, when the decline of dawdling could inspire such sincere regret.
And yet, in our plague year, a new book — Matthew Beaumont’s passionate, profoundly chaotic “The Walker” — again grouses about how we walk, where and why, this time connecting the changes in our gait to the transformation of our cities and social bonds. It’s the slow death of purposeless walking as symptom of the slow death of democracy, of the human.
Beaumont is the author of a previous book on the subject, “Nightwalking,” a “nocturnal history” of London. In it, he quoted Roberto Bolaño on the “two opposite types” of people you meet late at night: “those running out of time and those with time to burn.”
In contrast, Beaumont selects his new subjects (most of them authors) for their relationship to their particular time — for their allergy to their era. These writers are the “indicator species,” he says, taking a term from biology; from their suffering (and the suffering of their characters) we can extrapolate the sickness of their age — which is to say, Beaumont writes, the sickness of capitalism. He profiles some of literature’s most obsessive pedestrians and fluent malcontents, for whom walking was both “spiritual imperative” and psychological torment of a very productive kind — Poe, Ford Madox Ford, Dickens.
A breakthrough: The heroically cogitating, exquisitely sensitive, cruelly alienated solitary male consciousness is finally getting his due! Beaumont is at least a bit sheepish on this score. He nods at the stories that go missing in his narrative, acknowledging, for example, Lauren Elkin’s excellent “Flâneuse,” a study of women walkers of the city including Jean Rhys, Sophie Calle and Agnès Varda.
Beaumont does include a section on Virginia Woolf and her great London novel, “Mrs. Dalloway,” only it’s not Clarissa Dalloway who concerns him but shellshocked Septimus Smith, whose bloody hallucinations reveal the violent underpinnings of imperial London. Beaumont argues that Smith, like Poe’s narrators, possesses the clarity of the convalescent, for whom everything is new, painfully vivid, exaggerated and yet somehow truthful. It’s a quality of attention held holy in this book. Beaumont deplores its degradation, whether by the capitalist injunction to hurry, scurry, produce and consume or by the smartphone, which hijacks our gaze and prevents us from noticing how “public space is covertly being colonized by corporate interests and reinvented as an archipelago of private spaces to which ordinary citizens have at best limited access.”
Borrowing from Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur as a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness,” Beaumont calls the distracted walker “a smartphone endowed with consciousness.”
Easy target, that. Beaumont is perfunctory on the more interesting and important questions about the takeover of public spaces — for whom have these spaces been “public”? Who are these “ordinary citizens”? He gestures to the experiences of those excluded from the city, asserting that his goal is to harness the particular gaze of the “privileged” writers to freshly regard the city, and to make it less exclusive. He may worry about “the marginalized,” but he rarely if ever cites or consults their work.
Even as Black artists have complicated, adopted, parodied the notion of flânerie, they are absent here — an omission that feels striking given Beaumont’s phosphorescent erudition (and his advanced case of quotomania). His book fairly buckles under its references to the great theorists of walking, the body, the city. All the usual suspects are present, although at times deployed strangely. Ray Bradbury is endowed with his own section while Walter Benjamin, as significant a figure imaginable where such subjects are concerned, hovers at the edges of scenes, solicitously holding up a tray of useful quotations.
Writing and walking have shared a long association. Dickens thought nothing of tramping 30 miles into the country for breakfast — and that after long nights traversing London, composing on the fly. He might have crossed paths with Thomas De Quincey, who floated over the city on opium fumes. The serious walkers of our era include Philip Roth, who would punctuate his morning work with a five-mile walk. In almost any weather, you’ll still see Vivian Gornick flying down Seventh Avenue for her afternoon constitutional.
When they’re not walking, writers are busy extolling walking, frothing on about creativity and movement. I wonder if it isn’t because they’re a little embarrassed about how much time they spend sitting. No treatises to that, you’ll notice, their real specialty.
Schopenhauer described walking as “a continuously checked falling.” Is writing any different? What distinguishes Beaumont’s book, for its doggedly narrow focus, is how it mimics — in form, excess, annoyance — the very experience it extols, of moving through the city. Here is the city at high summer, all volume and amplitude, polyphony, frantic pitch. Here is the pleasure of gawking, the pleasure of having one’s senses overwhelmed, the pleasure of critique. We never move through a city without feeling a little proprietary exasperation, a little utopian: How could our journey be improved, be made better, fairer, more beautiful?
Watching Writers Pace the Streets, and Seeing Symptoms of Social Ills. By Parul Sehgal. The New York Times , November 3, 2020
A
literary history of walking from Dickens to Žižek
When I set off across the Champs de Mars in order to stand beneath the Tower, my footsteps disturbed several rats that had been eating from the ruined litterbins full of tourists’ droppings. The rats loped across the path in front of me and disappeared into the dirty pools of darkness beneath the nearby trees – it reminded me of the repulsive landscape described by Robert Browning in his dream-like quest-poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, where the grass grows ‘as scant as hair in leprosy’, and rats shriek like babies.
I felt frightened. If I’d seen anyone else standing or walking in the precincts of the Tower, I’d have panicked and run. There was no one. Perhaps that was more ominous. In Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum, a taxi driver admits to the narrator that at night he always feels compelled to accelerate past the Eiffel Tower because it scares him. Why? ‘Parce que … parce que ça fait peur, c’est tout.’ I too felt that fear – and couldn’t remain an instant longer. So I rapidly retraced my steps to the rue de l’Université, spooked by the thought of the Tower rearing up implacably behind me. I felt as if a layer of skin had been scraped from my back beneath my neat, black rucksack and thick clothes.
Turning into the avenue de La Bourdonnais I slid into a dark dreamscape: a handgun lay on the doorstep of a building to my left; solid, geometric, shocking. It must have been dropped on the stone step by someone running up the avenue, or tossed from a passing car. I tried to remember the emergency number as I pictured the man who had left it… then imagined him returning for it and finding me. Perhaps it was one of the young men who, an hour or so earlier, had almost run me down at a junction, hip-hop pumping from their car as they shouted incomprehensible abuse.
As I peered more closely at the gun I realised with a creeping sense of the ridiculous that it looked, well, plastic. Peering closer, I saw it didn’t have a trigger, and must have been bought in one of those shops retailing things, stuff, crap for €1.50 a pop. Behind me, sagging in the rain, a cardboard box filled with broken toys and kids’ clothes had been abandoned on a bench.
The police ascertained soon enough that these arms belonged to a local ‘collector’ – the term sounded euphemistic to me – who had recently died. But it wasn’t entirely clear why the man’s relatives, however desperate to have them off their hands, had dumped the weapons in public bins in a densely populated part of Paris. ‘This was a completely inconsiderate act,’ a police representative commented humourlessly, ‘because the weapons were still operational and could have fallen into the wrong hands.’
As many as 20,000 Romanichels, or Gitans, as they’re known in France, subsist in abject conditions in makeshift camps on the suburban margins of the capital and other cities. There they are often the victims of vigilante attacks by local residents, like the one that ended the life of a sixteen-year old Roma known as Darius near the A1 motorway in June 2014. They are also the target of violent expulsions by the police. The forcible eviction of these camps and the repatriation of their inhabitants commenced under Nicolas Sarkozy, prompting one EU Commissioner to compare it to the persecution of Jews during the Occupation. It has continued, even been extended, under François Hollande. Amnesty International claims that more than 10,000 Roma were evicted from temporary camps in the first half of 2013.
I had begun my noctambulisme shortly before 9 p.m. on Sunday, walking northeast from the Place de la République to the périphérique. After a coffee I climbed the hill to Belleville. At the entrance to the Couronnes metro station a black man in his fifties and a white man in his twenties sifted through a tangled stack of broken furniture, like nineteenth-century ragpickers, and poked at the rotten vegetables spilling out of crates that had been dumped there. On the rue des Couronnes, an elderly, bearded man in a foetal position slept heavily on the pavement, piss leaking from his trousers and forming a runnel as it snaked down the steeply sloping street.
These narratives, which often provided detailed portraits of particular places, especially ones with corrupt reputations, also paid close attention to the precise times when more or less nefarious activities unfolded in the streets. As distinct from diaries, they were noctuaries (in his Dictionary of the English Language [1755], Samuel Johnson defined a "noctuary" simply as "an account of what passes at night"). These apparently unmediated, more or less diaristic accounts of what happened during the course of the night on the street embodied either a tragic or a comic parable of the city, depending on whether their authors intended to celebrate its nightlife or condemn it as satanic.
The nocturnal picaresque, composed more often in prose than in verse, was a distinctively modern, metropolitan form that, with several other literary genres that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comprised a response to the dramatic social and architectural transformations of the metropolis after the Great Fire of 1666.
This was the epoch when both the West End, which the aristocracy colonized, and the suburbs to the south and east of the City, where the poor were exiled, expanded exponentially. By 1700, when its population reached approximately 550,000, London had outstripped Paris to become the largest city in Europe. Its concentration of imperial trade, industry, and government made it the most advanced and most energetic metropolitan centre in the world. Leo Hollis has even speculated that "the true 'English Revolution' was seen not in the 1640s, or in 1688, but in the 1690s", when the expansion and recomposition of London "shattered the traditional urban space into enclaves and modern neighbourhoods" and "the city at large became a fluid mixture of anonymous and closely knit communities formed by new relationships dependent on work, status, religion and gender".
These social and topographical changes, especially this segregation, reshaped people’s psychogeographical relationship to the metropolis and its proliferating, increasingly complex forms. A number of different types of publication mapped and explored London after the Fire. These included guidebooks, street directories, topographical surveys, urban instruction manuals and antiquarian tour-books. They also included anti-pastoral poems, or "urban georgics", such as Jonathan Swift’s "Description of a City Shower" (1710) and John Gay’s Trivia (1716). And, most prominently, pioneering instances of the novel, as practiced in particular by Daniel Defoe – "probably the first writer to grasp the exotic possibilities of city life with its unpredictable energies tempting the urban adventurer into ever new situations."
The nocturnal picaresque, which provided a moral map of the metropolitan night, was related to all these genres. But it was above all a type of "ramble or spy narrative", a form that structured its account of the daily life of the city in terms of the adventures its narrator experienced in the course of a pedestrian stroll through its precincts. The ramble narrative claimed to record these scenes, which were at once sensational and typical of everyday life in the metropolis, as if they had momentarily occurred, at a particular time of day, in precisely located streets.
Like the ramble narrative, the nocturnal picaresque was rendered possible by the fact that, in spite of its rapidly rising population, which leapt by at least 200,000 in the first half of the eighteenth century, London was still not too immense to be circumambulated. The anonymous author of The Ambulator; Or, the Stranger’s Companion in a Tour Round London (1774) measured the metropolis, which included Westminster and Southwark as well as the City itself, as being five miles from east to west and three miles from north to south. It was still a pedestrian’s city, in spite of the rising levels of horse-drawn traffic.
The nocturnal picaresque was also rendered possible by the constantly flickering play of light and dark characteristic of the metropolis at night in the era of public street lighting initiated in the mid-1680s. For this technology, inconsistent and intermittent as the oil-burning street lamps were, provided the ideal theatrical conditions for staging the city’s social contradictions. The sooty, smutty industrial smoke that thickened and blackened the air in the day — especially in the City, where bakers, brewers, glassmakers, potters, and blacksmiths burned quantities of coal in the labyrinthine back streets – intensified these conditions at night.
The pioneering example of the nocturnal picaresque was John Dunton’s The Night-Walker: Or, Evening Rambles in Search after Lewd Women, with the Conferences Held with Them, which appeared in 1696, roughly a decade after public lighting was first introduced in London.
An author and bookseller who insisted that "Life is a continued Ramble", Dunton had founded the Athenian Mercury, Britain’s first successful periodical, in 1691. A committed Anglican whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been ministers in the Church of England, Dunton published Proposals for a National Reformation of Manners in 1694 as part of a moral crusade led by Queen Mary. The Night-Walker, another periodical, which declared on the title page of its October 1696 issue that it was "To be publish’d Monthly, ’till a Discovery be made of all the chief Prostitutes in England, from the Pensionary Miss, down to the Common Strumpet", was a supplementary contribution to Mary II’s campaign, albeit one whose crusading ambition was somewhat compromised by its scurrilous content. It folded in 1697 after eight issues — though not, presumably, because it had successfully recorded the identity of every prostitute in London.
The Night-Walker comprised a series of tracts against whoring and whore-mongering among the metropolitan nobility. It was inspired in part by anxieties about the degeneration of aristocratic bloodlines:
“Some of you value your selves as being the Representatives of Ancient and Noble Families; but by the Methods which you take, you will deprive your Posterity of those Pretensions, for you give your Ladies occasion to repay you in your own Coin.”
As the Dedication in its first issue indicates, it reserved especially vituperative feelings for clergymen, judges, and other hypocritical members of the upper class who, though "mighty Pretenders to impartial Justice, and zealous Asserters of Liberty and Property", had debauched "poor Maids" and exposed both them and the "spurious Issue" they have had by them to "Poverty, Reproach and Punishment". The Night-Walker detailed Dunton’s attempts to pursue these upright representatives of Society, and the "Suburb Strumpet[s]" with whom they consorted, through the streets of London, which he bemoaned as "a second Sodom". The periodical’s title thus referred both to the activities of the prostitutes and their clients — and to Dunton’s identity as a noctambulant.
Middle- and upper-middle-class men such as Dunton were, of course, far freer in their movements at night than women. In the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth, "the suspicion of prostitution fell upon women who were about at night unaccompanied and without justification". Picaresque accounts of the streets at night in the eighteenth century are therefore predicated on a male subject, one that is physically mobile and, more often than not, both patrician in his attitude to the poor and patriarchal in his attitude to women.
“In the dead of night, in spite of the electric lights and the remnants of nightlife, London is an alien city, especially if you are strolling through its lanes and thoroughfares alone,” writes Matthew Beaumont in the introduction to his Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, out now from Verso Books. Well, do you know your city at night? And, if not: do you know it at all?
Chaucer and Shakespeare, Johnson and Blake, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Dickens — all were nighttwalkers. And 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. It’s a story that paradoxically meanders with a purpose, like a walk to nowhere in particular, from “the Middle Ages to the height of the gaslight era in the mid-nineteenth century.”
In the below excerpt, we learn about Charles Dickens’ maniacal nighttwalks through London and Paris, and the effect it likely had on his novels.
Ancient Secrets
In his delightful and profoundly insightful monograph on Dickens, [G.K.] Chesterton argued that the novelist’s originality and genius resided in the fact that he possessed, ‘in the most sacred and serious sense of the term, the key of the street’:
“Few of us understand the street. Even when we step into it, as into a house or a room of strangers. Few of us see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only — the street-walker or the street-Arab, the nomads who, generation after generation, have kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of us know even less. The street at night is a great house locked up. But Dickens had, if ever man had, the key of the street; his stars were the lamps of the street; his hero was the man in the street. He could open the inmost door of his house – the door that leads into that secret passage which is lined with houses and roofed with stars. “
Chesterton’s emphasis on the importance to Dickens of the street at night was perceptive. Dickens was quite as interested in the nomads that occupied the nocturnal city – the streetwalkers and the nightwalkers – as in those who occupied the diurnal one. He wanted to understand those who kept their ancient secrets beneath the cold light of the moon as well as the full blaze of the sun. Indeed, he was himself – in an ‘amateur way’, to use a characteristic formulation – one of these nomadic people. It was in the streets at night, and among its strange folk, that he sought the solution not only to the riddle of the modern city but to his own inscrutable, often secretive, existence.
It was probably in the late 1830s and early 1840s that Dickens first regularly walked at night in London. These were the years, so the historian Joachim Schlör claims, when night in the European metropolis first came to represent a distinctive challenge both for those who policed it and for the bourgeois imagination itself. From roughly 1840, faced with fears that emerged as a result of the rise of the so-called dangerous classes, ‘the complete city-dweller [had] to learn to master the night’. Schlör’s claim that, after this time, ‘night is more than simply a darker version of the day’, seems exaggerated.23 In the city, night had for centuries been socially, psychologically and even ontologically different to the day, as the career of the common nightwalker and his or her descendants indicated. But he is nonetheless right to emphasize a shift at this time, on the grounds that the night became a pressing social problem in the increasingly conflicted and contradictory centres of industrial capitalism.
As a young man, Dickens regularly strolled in the streets at night for purely companionable or sociable purposes. In his biography of Dickens, Fred Kaplan observes that in the late 1830s Dickens often socialized with Forster and their friend Daniel Maclise, and that together they frequently amused themselves with ‘dinners and drinks in city and county inns, rapid overnight trips to Kent, late-night walks through London streets, cigars, brandy, and conversation’. In this guise, exchanging ‘elaborate badinage, jokes about women, about eccentricities, about escapades’, they are not unlike Tom, Jerry and Logic in Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) This is Dickens the genial roisterer, who inhabited the populous, glittering streets of central London – illuminated in the hours after dusk by the innumerable gaslights that flared from shop windows – as if they were a comfortable, albeit brilliant, interior.
But Dickens was also beginning to roam at night with a darker, more solipsistic sense of purpose at this point – or, with a compulsive sense of purposelessness. It appears likely, for example, that at the start of the 1840s he first returned at night to the site of Warren’s, the blacking factory where he had laboured as a twelve-year-old child, labelling bottles, while his father served his prison sentence for debt. In the autobiographical fragment that Dickens wrote for Forster in 1847, he confirmed that, ‘in my walks at night I have walked there often, since then, and by degrees I have come to write this’. As in his subsequent recollections of loitering outside Maria Winter’s house, the activities of nightwalking and reconstructing decisive or even traumatic events from his past were curiously, elaborately intertwined (in this respect, as in others, he was like De Quincey). ‘I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man’, Dickens wrote of the inexorable pull of the blacking factory, ‘and wander desolately back to that time of my life’. Both dreaming and nightwalking involved ‘wandering desolately back’ into the past.
Black Streets
Increasingly, too, nightwalking seems to have become instrumental to the business of writing, itself a compulsive activity for Dickens. It provided release – sometimes instantaneous, sometimes not – from the uncontainable sense of excitement or frustration he often felt during the composition of his fiction, the serial production of which exerted peculiarly intense demands on his psyche. On 2 January 1844, for example, Dickens wrote to his friend Cornelius Felton, Professor of Greek at Harvard University, informing him that he had sent a package to him by steamship containing a copy of A Christmas Carol (1843): ‘Over which Christmas Carol’, the novelist writes in the third person, ‘Charles Dickens wept and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in the composition; and thinking whereof, he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles, many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed.’ It is as if, but for the freedom to roam through the ‘black streets of London’, the back streets of the city at night, he might have burst – like the boiler of the steamship that throbbed across the Atlantic with the book he had sent to Felton.
On the occasions when for one reason or another, during the composition of a book, Dickens could not pace freely about the metropolis at night, the absence of the ‘black streets’ crippled him. ‘Put me down on Waterloo-bridge at eight o’clock in the evening, with leave to roam about as long as I like, and I would come home, as you know, panting to go on’, he wrote to his confidant Forster from Genoa in 1844, when he was labouring on The Chimes (1844); ‘I am sadly strange as it is, and can’t settle.’ ‘He so missed his long night-walks before beginning anything’, commented Forster, ‘that he seemed, as he said, dumbfounded without them.’
Two years later, on the continent once again, Dickens’s ‘craving for streets’ became even more acute. At the end of August 1846, living with his family in Lausanne, where he was writing Dombey and Son (1848), he complained to Forster of ‘the absence of streets and numbers of figures’:
“I can’t express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!! … I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an opportunity of finding out before. My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them. I wrote very little in Genoa (only the Chimes), and fancied myself conscious of some such influence there – but Lord! I had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night, to walk about in; and a great theatre to repair to, every night.”
No one in the nineteenth century can have needed London quite as much as Dickens did. It was an addiction.
Dickens sickened when he did not have access to the phantasmagoric effects of the city – especially at night, when it was most like a magic lantern. In October 1846 he informed Forster of his delight at moving from Lausanne to Geneva, though he admitted that in the latter too he suffered from ‘occasional giddiness and headache’, which he confidently attributed ‘to the absence of streets’. Dickens subsisted on the lifeblood of the metropolitan city like a vampire, thriving on its streets and ‘figures’ as their energies ebbed after nightfall. Even in substantial, sociable urban centres such as Geneva and Genoa, which were extensively lighted at night, he felt claustrophobic because he did not have the same freedom to roam across considerable distances.
Paris, like London, offered Dickens relief from this sense of inhibition that seemed to paralyse both him and his characters. In another slightly desperate letter sent to Forster from Lausanne, this time in September 1846, at a time when he was deeply, painfully embroiled in the composition of Dombey and Son, he consoled himself with thoughts of the Parisian streets at night:
“The absence of any accessible streets continues to worry me, now that I have so much to do, in a most singular manner. It is quite a little mental phenomenon. I should not walk in them in the day time, if they were here, I dare say: but at night I want them beyond description. I don’t seem to be able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds. However, as you say, there are streets in Paris, and good suggestive streets too; and trips to London will be nothing then.”
On the night of his arrival in Paris, shortly after he sent this letter, Dickens escaped from the rest of the family, which had decamped to a small house in the Rue de Courcelles. As Forster reports, invoking Dickens’s adjective, he proceeded to take a ‘“colossal” walk about the city, of which the brilliancy and brightness almost frightened him’. Nightwalking was a territorial habit, one that enabled Dickens to orientate himself in the city, to realign the relationship between the metropolis and mental life. But it also offered a release from uncontainable emotions. In January 1847, he ‘slaughtered’ Paul Dombey, to use his term. ‘Then he walked through the streets of Paris until dawn’, as Peter Ackroyd reports. Thus he attempted to rid himself of one of his spectres. No doubt his nightwalk conjured up other ghosts — in the form of memories or fantasies — which he could not so easily escape or suppress.
Charles Dickens Nightwalks Through Paris and London. By Jonathon Sturgeon. Flavorwire , April 10, 2015
It is astonishing to discover that nightwalking was an illegal activity, alongside eavesdropping and prostitution, throughout centuries. Night has been associated with expansive adjectives: seductive, uncertain, uncanny, attractive, appealing, con-suming, dangerous and unsettling.
It has been the subject of regulation and control throughout centuries and across cultures. The following conversation is about mapping the night, looking into its inhabitants and the historical evolution of cities where the division between the good and the bad blurs.
Fatos Ustek: How would you describe the appeal of the night and how its seductive forces played a role in your immersion and interest in it?
Matthew Beaumont: It came about in two ways. The first was, I suppose, a professional interest, and the second a personal interest in the night. The professional interest was aroused as a result of many years teaching various novels and poems in my job, my day job as it were, in the English Department at UCL. I noticed that lots of the writers who I was most passionate about, most enjoyed teaching, wrote about the night in ways that I felt had been overlooked by the existing critical literature, by the existing accounts of English literary history. And I noticed that several of them, if not all of them, were people who went out and walked in London and then indeed in other places at night. And they did so in order to explore various things, which we can discuss in more detail if you like … but that made me think maybe there was a certain revisionist history of English literature to be written, about the nightside of literature, which I felt had also been neglected and overlooked in the existing critical accounts, histories, etc. And then there was this personal interest in the night, since my late teens, probably. I grew up in London; I’ve liked walking at night, and while I was researching the book, I did a lot of walking at night in Paris and in other places as well as in London. And so I wanted to transmit to the book something of the atmosphere of London at night from my personal experience, even if it was going to end up rather abstracted and displaced in the form of an academic book. I wanted to bring that personal interest in the night to bear on the book, even if I didn’t explicitly write in an autobiographical way. I mean, the prefaces are slightly autobiographical and then the afterword is also autobiographical. So there is this little bit of that personal dimension in there. Although not as much as I might have hoped.
Fatos: You introduce a historical tra-jectory about how night has been assigned different connotations. Perhaps if you could start from a general set of attributes; it is like the night is a place where the invisible becomes more powerful than the visible; we can attribute many lexicons such as the unknown or the stillness that constitute the landscape of the night.
Or it is a place of uncertainties that can evoke danger, potential violence as well as intrigue or witnessing other people’s ways of being. We could also go into detail, elaborating different ways the night is regarded or controlled, but what did you want to explore the most? Would you say that the night has a feminine connotation? Could you perhaps share with us what night evokes for you?
Matthew: What night most evokes in me, is, I suppose, a sense of the uncanny. It is a familiar concept and has been for a long time because Freud wrote about it in 1919; but it is not the [uncanny that] I use explicitly in the book. I was looking at the city in the night as an uncanny phenomenon. I was trying to explore the ways in which, at night, at nightfall, the city becomes unsettling and intriguing at the same time, which is to say, in terms of what Freud sets out in his essay: everything that is, or once was, familiar in the day becomes subtly strange in the night under the altered social circumstances, in altered optical conditions of the night when darkness falls, when artificial light emerges. So what I wanted to do was analyse that sensation in terms of the way in which writers over the centuries have tried to evoke it or represented it. It seems to me, living in the city, it is at least partly lit at night by LED lights (which are unbearably bright, I think) that completely expel the mysteriousness of night from the places where they are used. Even though we are being encouraged to think that we live in a 24-hour city, nonetheless, there is something residually, vestigially, uncanny about the city at night. And this brings me onto, I suppose, the question of what I wanted to do with the book. One of the things, certainly, centrally, that I wanted was to reconstruct the history of, as I see it, the protagonist of the city at night in its thousand-or-more-year history, certainly since the Middle Ages: this figure of a nightwalker, the person who inhabits the night at least in part because they don’t feel at home in the city in the day – because they don’t inhabit the city comfortably in the day. I was interested in that figure, which for thousands of years has been a vagrant figure. I mean, originally, in the Middle Ages such a figure was identified as a vagrant or a prostitute, but today still they would be a vagrant in the sense of homeless people whose population we have seen exploding over the last few years onto the streets of London, as in other cities, in fact, that have been subject to the economic crisis that we’ve experienced over the last ten years.
Fatos: Could you perhaps give an example from the Middle Ages context?
Matthew: John Dunton’s The Night-Walker: Or, Evening Rambles in Search after Lewd Women, with the Conferences Held with Them appeared in 1696, roughly a decade after public lighting was first introduced in London. The Night-Walker comprised a series of tracts against whoring and whore-mongering among the metropolitan nobility. It was inspired in part by anxieties about the degeneration of aristocratic bloodlines. Dunton is a splendid embodiment of the contradictory but symbiotic relationship between puritanical impulses and satanic ones in the nocturnal city. The moral kicks he got from the streets at night cannot be extricated from his sexual kicks. In him the night-watcher and the nightwalker were in an uncomfortably close relationship.
As the historian Joachim Schlör remarks of the ‘missionaries’ who patrolled the nineteenth-century city at night, ‘they too “penetrate” into the nocturnal city, they too seek the extraordinary experience, they too participate in the cycle of chance encounters, they too see how far they can go.’
Fatos:
We could perhaps explore this idea of security and relationship to power, but
what I was intrigued by was the situation of the nightwalker that you map
through different accounts; the nightwalker could have a wealthy background, an
aristocratic background, and so has a different way of relating to the city at
night as well as in the day.
Matthew: Middle- and upper-middle-class men, those I have identified as noctambulants, were of course far freer in their movements at night than women. In the eighteenth century, as in the nineteenth, ‘the suspicion of prostitution fell upon women who were about at night unaccompanied and without justification’.2 Picaresque accounts of the streets at night in the eighteenth century are therefore predicated on a male subject, one that is physically mobile and, more often than not, both patrician in his attitude to the poor and patriarchal in his attitude to women.
The
partial exception to this rule, which in the end it probably reinforces, is The
Midnight-Ramble: or, The Adventures of Two Noble Females: Being a True and
Impartial Account of their Late Excursion through the Streets of London and
Westminster (1754). This intriguing fiction, published by an anonymous author
who is presumably male, features two gleeful female protagonists that explore
the streets of London at night in disguise.
The narrative opens with an account of the reasons for the heroine’s social (and perhaps sexual) frustration. Lady Betty, a virtuous young woman, has been married off to Dorimant, a dissolute nobleman who spends ‘his Evenings in riotous Mirth and Debauchery at the Taverns; and most commonly pass[es] the Remainder of the Night, in the Arms of some courtesan at a Bagnio’. She befriends Mrs Sprightly, the wife of Dorimant’s best friend Ned, and the two women resolve to disguise themselves as monks in order to monitor their husbands’ nocturnal activities in the city. In prosecuting this plan, they commission their milliner, Mrs Flim, whose name signals that she is adept at idle deception, to bring them ‘ordinary Silk Gowns, close Capuchins, and black Hats’. And, having taken care ‘to exhilerate their Spirits with a Bottle of excellent Champain’, the three of them set off in pursuit of the men.
After spying on their husbands at the playhouse, the three women are frustrated in their attempt to follow them by coach to a tavern at Temple Bar because there are so few vehicles on the street. Instead, though it is past 10 p.m., they determine ‘upon following their Chace on Foot, at all Hazards’.3 At a spot between Somerset House and the so-called New Church on the Strand (St Mary le Strand), they meet ‘four Street-Walkers, that had been long used to tramp those Quarters’. These prostitutes assume that, because of ‘the Oddness of our Ladies Disguise’, Lady Betty and Mrs Sprightly are ‘some Strangers of their own Occupation, that were come thither to trespass upon their Walks’. So they jostle and curse their rivals.
…they were going from one party to another, from one ball to another, from one gaming table to another…
Fatos: There is kind of a reciprocation of the nightwalker, as you said: the one who can’t fully belong to the day and its goings-on; and the nightwalker who actually suffers from insomnia or some kind of unsettlement within his ontological manifestation. Could you perhaps elaborate more about this idea of the nightwalker? What is it that he is after? I would assume that there is this relationship of desire, a need or a form of satisfaction fulfilled through being out on the streets in the night.
Matthew: One way of approaching it would be to cite a line that I quote in the introduction to the book, a line from 2666, the wonderful novel by Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean novelist. He refers in passing to people inhabiting the night, either having time to burn or running out of time. And my point in quoting him, is to say that, actually, the kind of people who inhabit the night really experience both states at the same time; that the kind of people who walk in the night loiter in the night, are those who both simultaneously have time to burn and are running out of time. And that’s the paradox, if you like, that I am trying to explore and dramatize in my book. The neglected, overlooked, forgotten inhabitants of the modernizing city ever since the Middle Ages have been those who find a kind of home in the night because they, one way or another, are either materially or spiritually homeless in the day, and at the same time have lots of time on their hands; they can loiter, they can walk back and forth across the city with no apparent commitments. But they are also in some way running out of time, they are … clock ticking against them; the world is against them. They are on the kind of path of destruction, or distinction. There are lots of noir novels and noir films in the twentieth century that feature this kind of character. For example, the central character in Night and the City, a novel by Gerald Kersh and then a film by Jules Dassin, has all sorts of time to loiter around and chat with other more or less criminal or petty criminal types in the streets at night in Central London, but at the same time he is on the run, he is being hunted down, his time is up, and that is very much a characteristic experience of the nightwalker. Not just from the bottom end of the social scale but among bohemians, relatively privileged types being out of time and having too much time. As you rightly implied, there are various different social strata of nightwalkers. At the very bottom in the Middle Ages we’ve got the common nightwalker who is criminalized in the late thirteenth century, if not earlier, by a law known as the Nightwalker Statute: anyone breaking the curfew was liable to be rounded up by the Nightwatch, which was the primitive form of policing in London right until the early nineteenth century, and they could be imprisoned or even deported. So there is the common nightwalker, but there are the various other kinds, perhaps including the Nightwatch himself, who was also someone who had to walk and to patrol at night, and who was also often a semi-criminal type. Then there are the more middle-class nightwalkers who I refer to in the book as noctambulants rather than noctivagants. The noctambulants are those who are much more like the flaneurs; the famous flaneur in Baudelaire’s poetry and prose ambles about the city at night in a relatively leisured way, sucking in its life; perhaps exploring it in literature, or in some cases they amble about the night or go out into the streets at night in order to save the vagrant population of the city; to save the prostitutes, or to save the homeless people from perdition, perhaps by Christianizing them, by evangelizing to them. Then there is, as you also said, the aristocratic types who even in the Middle Ages had free passage through the city at night. Because of their privileged status they were given a pass by the nightwatchmen who were exempt from the rules, unlike the noctivagants or common nightwalkers, increasingly treating the city at night as a source of sociability, going from one party to another, from one ball to another, from one gaming table to another. The class stratification of society at night is particularly clear, I think, and that is one of the things that excites me about the night: paradoxically the darkness illuminates society in unexpected ways. One sees the society in relief, in particularly interesting light and in a kind of chiaroscuro effect that isn’t available in the day.
Fatos: Could you open it up a little bit? What do you mean by that?
Matthew: I suppose I mean that there are class divisions, but there are also gender divisions, and ones in terms of race are particularly visible in the darkness. So one’s social status is historically very much apparent at night in a way that it isn’t so much in the day among the pressive bodies where everybody appears to have their business to do and places to go. Things to get up to. Gender divisions are particularly acute, more acute even than the class distinctions at night. I mean, women historically, of course, have simply not had access to the city at night in the same way that men have. They don’t have what I call a right to the city at night, they haven’t had a right to the city at night historically because it’s been potentially so dangerous for them. The night renders them vulnerable either to forms of harassment or to abuse or to assault or to criminalization as sex workers. Although some men from the working class have historically been vulnerable in the night, that vulnerability is nothing like the vulnerability of women historically at night. In the twentieth century, black minority men and women in the night have been even more susceptible to criminalization and marginalization. It has been assumed that they are conspired against in some ways or they are criminals in some way, and ‘stop and search’ has been particularly aggressively used. For example, young black men at night – and it still the case in America today as well as in Britain – have been prone to multiple incidents over the last few years, as the Black Lives Matter campaign testifies: with curfews being imposed in supposedly advanced cities in the most powerful nation in the world, going right back to these medieval forms of policing.
Fatos: Yes, exactly. I was very much intrigued by the kind of reciprocation of the three illegal acts that were commonly regulated, or committed/punished: nightwalking, eavesdropping and prostitution. It is interesting to think about how the initial concept of the city started to emerge with the subject who actually works, how the night needs to be even more controlled. Could you perhaps talk us through this historical trajectory?
Matthew: Perhaps it is best to start with the Middle Ages and the legal construction of the night, if you like. I suppose the most important initial point is the curfew, the introduction of the curfew in 1068 by William I (William the Conqueror) only a couple of years after he did conquer England. So he introduces the curfew ostensibly in order to avoid conflagrations in the night, and in order to stop fire spreading through the city and destroying it; it has happened, of course, spectacularly in 1666. The word is derived from, a corruption of, the French word couvrir le feu (cover fire) but it was also clearly a way for William I of policing, pre-empting political conspiracies in the aftermath of his invasion, and that in some ways set a tone for the policing of the city at night thereafter. There was always a political dimension to it, I think, to the control that was exerted by the curfew and the control that was exerted by the Nightwatch, as it was later instituted. So the curfew becomes a means not only of pre-empting conspiracies but also policing population and of trying to keep the riff-raff off the streets. In the late Middle Ages, under the impact of inclosures in the countryside – which really is the emergence of capitalism in its agrarian form – thousands and thousands of migrants, of migrant labourers from the countryside, former peasants, came to London and other cities looking for work, and there wasn’t enough work, and many of them became vagrants, many of them became homeless, had to beg and had to sell their bodies if they were women. This expanding population had to be policed and to be marginalized, had to be anathematized, and the Nightwatch and these nightwalker statutes, from at least the thirteenth century on, were used to do that. At the same time, thinking further about this context of early capitalism, there was increasingly an insistence on an ideology of productive labour in the day, which made night-time activity seem completely unacceptable. And that runs right through to the eighteenth and nineteenth century and arguably to the present. There was an emphasis on daytime people being good, healthy, productive, contributing to society and to the economy, with night-time people being those who more or less flagrantly refused that logic, that logic of the Protestant ethic, spirit of capitalism, etc., who by staying up all night for whatever reason and sleeping in the day were placing themselves consciously or unconsciously outside of the disciplinary regime of capitalism as it was emerging … Still today, those who sleep in the day and go out at night are really seen as sort of insurrectionaries, in that they inverse the order, the benign order, supposedly benign order, of a productive capitalist economy.
Fatos: Because it is not only the mind that is disciplined or regulated but also the bodies in that sense.
Matthew: Yes, a body that goes to bed early, sleeps more or less through the night and gets up at dawn to go and work, from the Middle Ages onwards, is a productive body in terms of the economy, and it is a body that is reproductive as well in reliable and legitimate and acceptable ways. The reproduction of society through the generation of people as well as the generation of wealth is secured and guaranteed according to the official intensifying capitalist ideology from the late Middle Ages onwards. It is a good society, a positive community, and those who lie around in the day and venture out to the streets at night are overturning that.
Matthew: Night, certainly in the Middle Ages, and arguably still to some slight extent, is associated with the powers of darkness, with something or with some things, with phenomena that are extra human, superhuman, subhuman… However, we want to describe them and they are totally other to society as it’s laboriously constructed and maintained, and one of the things that the legislation and the policing of the city has done historically is to identify people who are forced for one reason or another to inhabit the night, or who choose to inhabit the city at night. It identifies them with the spiritual, the ontological, the metaphysical, with the ghostly, with the spectral, with the evil, with all those primitive or even primal forces and energies that disrupt the rational operation of society. That has been a powerful weapon of the state, and of the authorities and the police, for more than a thousand years; that you are somehow associated implicitly with evil if you inhabit the night. To give a generic example from today, in a serial-killer movie, for example, they draw on this ancient or almost mythical identification of the person in the night and on the streets in the night with the primal forces of darkness.
Fatos: Provoking the forces of darkness, could we also talk about the different sensual ways of relating to the night?
Matthew: Night-time entails a different sensorium, particularly in the city, especially when the streets are empty, and especially compared to the daytime. Night-time sensorium eroticizes bodies, there are positive and negative consequences of that. Those consequences are apparent throughout the centuries in London, the positive being that it opens the city out to possibly exciting and potentially intimate interaction. Sexual, bodily interaction of a kind that is forbidden in the day; negative in the sense that it brings into sharp focus the sexual politics of the society that is less visible in the day. A woman on her own on the streets in the night, is a crucial example; she is either potentially a victim or potentially a predator. That kind of stark dichotomous division does not apply in the same way to men at night. The social hierarchies, asymmetry between the sexes based on a predatory sexual paradigm, are particularly inherent.
Fatos: If we think about the erotic as a fluctuating space where visibility makes sense through the invisible, or exceeding the societal regulation … How could we talk about eroticism and its intrinsic qualities, explored intellectually and practically from the perspective of night-time figures?
Matthew: Association of the night legal or illegal, with primitive forces and darkness and legal associations of criminality, heightens the erotic dimension of the night. Going back to the Middle Ages, the category of eavesdropping becomes important, in the courts and the Nightwatch, because both carry with them these vague and predatory associations. Standing outside the house either listening in or looking in on people inside as they are going about their business: eavesdropping is associated with voyeurism and also picking up gossip. There is a clear sense from the Middle Ages of the sexual charge that the night brings.
The Romantics, poets and thinkers of the eighteenth century, of rapidly industrializing cities of Britain and Europe, saw in the night the possibility to transgress the limits of the bourgeoisie family, the limits of home, limits of a cosy, comfortable domesticity and interiority. They were interested in a different kind of interiority, interiority of the self. They were interested in the outsiders of the society, the poor and the neglected. The night introduces a regime that focused ideologically on the family. On one hand Dickens sentimentalizes the family, and on the other he has an acute sense of the corruption of the family, the nuclear ideal of the bourgeoisie family. He, of course, himself relentlessly walked at night, pounding the streets at a remarkable pace, at times crossing thirty miles’ distance overnight, so fast and hard that he started hallucinating. On the other hand, his famous essay ‘Night Walks’ gives ample evidence of the night-time ecology; in this he has makes observations and sketches people, conscious of people at night, loitering or cruising.
Matthew Beaumont on London Nightwalking: Evoking the Dangerous and Sensual.
As Matthew Beaumont points out in the introduction to this lively and learned study, it is at night that London reveals its true strangeness. Away from the “sodium gleam” of street lamps and the strip lights of minicab offices, there are alleys where “the darkness appears to collect in a solid, faintly palpitating mass”. Occasionally it takes on the form of a skulking fox, but otherwise it remains full of mystery and a vague sense of threat. Within it live some of the other city dwellers who paradoxically become most visible when it is darkest: “The lost, the lonely … The sleepless, the homeless. All the city’s internal exiles.”
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. Nightwalkers are outsiders who prefer to remain on the outside. 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. At night “we are no longer quite ourselves”, and we can explore who else we might want to be – or who we fear we might become.
The most surprising revelation of Beaumont’s book is how recently we have come to regard nightwalking with anything other than suspicion and alarm. For more than 1,000 years it was a crime. As early as the 12th century, the nightwalker appeared in a nervously extended list of the capital’s social evils: “Actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, Moors, flatterers, pretty-boys, effeminates, pederasts, singing- and dancing-girls, quacks, belly-dancers, sorceresses, extortioners, night-walkers …”
In his 1634 masque Comus, Milton referred to the “evil thing that walks by night”. For many years a curfew helped to promote the association of nightwalkers with felons (including streetwalkers) and demons. All were thought to be actually or potentially responsible for some of the city’s darkest deeds. All provoked an uneasy mixture of fascination and dread.
Not until 1827 was the ancient legislation against nightwalking finally repealed in England. However, human perception and the law often move at different speeds, and even though it was no longer a criminal offence to stroll or saunter at night, that did not prevent a newly formed police force from detaining anyone who gave cause for suspicion, even if that amounted to little more than looking a bit shifty.
The largest change had come slightly earlier, with the introduction of street lighting during (appropriately) the Enlightenment. Although for citizens living away from the main thoroughfares the nights remained “nasty, brutish, and all too long”, as Beaumont neatly observes, for others street lighting completely transformed London. Soon the popular understanding of “nightlife” had expanded to include entertainment as well as thieves lurking in the shadows. Not only did the theatres thrive, pools of gaslight added a theatrical glow to ordinary activities. Suddenly the city was full of spotlights that anyone could step into. Every street corner was potentially the location of a new nocturnal drama.
However, it seems that such social changes did little to alter the habits of London’s nightwalkers. Even in a newly illuminated city they were thought to carry little pools of darkness around inside themselves. By the end of the 19th century, the nightwalker had become a stock literary figure, although as Beaumont shows in a series of brilliant literary readings, if he was mobile in person he was equally hard to pin down in writing.
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. Nonetheless he is there, and Beaumont does an excellent job of bringing him out of the shadows, from young bucks who enjoyed tipping over the wooden huts in which nightwatchmen – many of them elderly and comically ineffective – spent the small hours snoozing, to the celebrated Captain Barclay, an athlete who in 1809 walked 1,000 miles in 1,000 successive hours for 1,000 guineas.
The other main strand of Beaumont’s argument involves showing why nightwalkers are such popular literary figures. This results in plenty of cultural history, such as a magazine article from 1780 that gravely advised its readers not to adopt “the sauntering gait of a lazy Spaniard”, but it also means showing how often authors themselves have been creatures of the night. Their number include Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, who spent impoverished parts of the 1730s engaged in various “midnight rambles”, or what Johnson’s Dictionary would later define as “noctivagation” (“the act of rambling or wandering in the night”), and William Blake, whose nocturnal wanderings seem to have been designed to discover the limits of the Enlightenment.
There was also Thomas De Quincey, whose “opium-tinctured nightwalks” helped to produce his characteristically digressive prose style, with its “drifting, shifting metaphors and its unpredictable accretion of clauses”, which “mimics the city’s labyrinthine logic, its unnerving transitions from one social identity to another, its dead ends and its sudden openings”.
Inevitably, Beaumont’s final example is Dickens, who spent many hours traipsing through the changing cityscape, as if trying to keep up with its own restlessness, and whose 1860 essay “Night Walks” made his experience of drifting through London in the pre-dawn hours seem as vividly indistinct as a dream.
Yet although Dickens was the undisputed king of the nightwalkers, he was not the last. An epilogue by Will Self describes how, on 20 June 2014, he accompanied Beaumont on a 16-mile walk from Stockwell in south London to a vantage point on the North Downs. It is as if they had decided to march back into the past. Armed with a litre flask of espresso, and fortified by sandwiches from Tesco, eventually they reach their destination, with “an eggshell sky cloudily cracking overhead”, and gaze down at the city below them as it groggily stirs into life.
It is a fitting climax to a book that remains personal in tone even when it is flexing its considerable intellectual muscle. Occasionally, Beaumont’s style can be cloudily academic, with sentences about “the consolidation of urban capitalism and its attendant class formations” and a generous sprinkling of references to Foucault, Adorno, Benjamin and co, but for the most part it is sharp and precise in its appreciation of London’s messy charms.
Indeed, for all his close focus on particular authors, it is hard to escape the impression that the main character in Beaumont’s book is not a person but a place. At night, London is like a monster holding its breath, but it is never entirely at rest. Listen closely, and it is possible to detect what Dickens described in Bleak House as “a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating”. It is as if the night itself is on the prowl.
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