Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

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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.

And all this with a heavy slant towards men of letters, when Beaumont doesn't switch to his other mode: a general description of London's social history, policing or analyzing specific words connected to walking. No missing or damaged pages, no tears, possible very minimal creasing, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins.But mainly this is an analysis of the works of literary night walkers - both the famous (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Dickens) and the obscure. So here we have narratives about walking at night, on or near his Shropshire farm or in France, in each of the four seasons. The author himself mentions not wanting to become too accustomed to the night lest it loses its power (the "explorer's wonder"). In one of his memorandum book entries from 1857, Dickens sketched out a plan for writing about the city in a new way. By the time you've stripped out poems by other authors, illustrations and footnotes to each walk giving other observations from the same season it's 30 pages long.

We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience.The others are Dark Skies by Tiffany Francis, Under the Stars by Matt Gaw (the overall best), and Nightwalk by Chris Yates.

This is my first experience reading John Lewis-Stempel and though I did have to slow down and reread some lines, to really 'get it', I found him stimulating and enjoyable company.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. So erzählt er nicht nur die Geschichte seiner Wanderung, sondern auch die anderer Menschen, die er bewundert.

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”.Studies of walking, in particular in its nocturnal form, are pretty thin on the ground and Beaumont has built a fantastic foundation for future academics to build upon. Succumbing to this temptation even undermines some of the things he's good at: I really appreciated the pointer to William Baldwin's Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, which I clearly need to read, but there's not even a passing reference to its anti-Catholic satirical intent, which seems surely necessary contextual information.