"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night," wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today - home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun's down. If nightwalking is a matter of "going astray" in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.

In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets.

With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.

• We started tracking this book on April 27, 2015.
• This book was £12.92 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 115 times in the past 3,674 days.
• The current price of this book is £6.00 last checked 15 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past year.
• The lowest price to date was £3.78 last reached on June 5, 2019.
• This book has been £3.78 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was £19.20 last reached on May 28, 2015.
• This book has been £19.20 one time since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionHistory & CriticismMovements & PeriodsModernism
• Politics & Social SciencesSocial SciencesSociology

• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 496 Pages
• File Size: 36 KB