Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

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By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. I learned about glow in the dark fungi (under 100 out of something 100,000) marsh light combustion - Jack O Lantern - and foxes can hear a watch tick sixty feet away.

Most women would not feel safe walking alone at night, and he doesn't even acknowledge that in being able to have this freedom he has something many people don't. Since this book spends so much time on the social history of London, couldn't there have been some room for this aspect?In Nightwalking, Matthew Beaumont rubs shoulders with the deviants, dissidents and dispossessed who lurk in the shadows of Shakespeare, Johnson, Blake and De Quincey. The night walks are separated into each season, and are roughly around 15 pages for each, which makes this book a quick and easy read.

And basing a book around every time someone wrote the words “night” or “nightwalker” throughout history became very repetitive. Full disclosure, I started skim reading from about the 3rd or 4th chapter in, when I realized this wasn't the book I was anticipating. The author is obviously the owner of My Big Book of Literary Criticism as the majority of the text reads as an over enthusiastic student's first essay. It is a hugely detailed work of literary and historical investigation which is over detailed and laborious at times but, in the end, repays the effort sometimes needed to get through it. Despite a certain serious engagement with historical material (that's clearly somewhat restricted), his approach seems to be guided by the rather more cavalier sweep of cultural studies.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. A walk in the deepest darkest night is something I would fear even in the countryside, but Lewis Stempel brings your senses alive with rich language and thought. Matthew Beaumont offers an alternative account of the city streets through the prism of its historical ‘nightwalkers’, uncovering hidden topographies of nocturnal London.

John Lewis-Stempel nimmt seine Leser auf vier Wanderungen durch die Landschaft rund um seine Farm mit. Elsewhere though it's brilliantly perceptive and overall it does make you think about nocturnal animals differently.I appreciated the Marxist analysis of both the history and literature included in the book and I thought it contributed to his argument. Just when you start to think it's getting dull, it picks up pace and you don't want the ride to end. 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.

There's a wealth of fascinating information about London at night from medieval times to the 19th century, not least the history of street lighting and curfews and the slow development of the policing of the night-time streets.

Indeed, the etymology of the terms ‘noctivagant’ and ‘vagrant’ hints at the notion of straying beyond established boundaries, and the night watchmen who were charged with protecting the city were often corrupt. 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. There was a contrast in tone between many of the poems prefacing the stories and the stories themselves, whose tone I didn't enjoy as much. Representing London – or Paris, or any great place – in the light of being actually unknown to all the people in the story”, he noted, could perhaps be done by adopting the “fears and fancies and opinions” of those who lived there, revealing the city to be “an odd unlikeness of itself”.