Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London

419 Pages·2015·3.7 MB·English

by  Matthew Beaumont

NIGHTWALKING
NIGHTWALKING
A Nocturnal History of London
Chaucer to Dickens
MATTHEW BEAUMONT
This book is dedicated to my sons
Jordan and Aleem Beaumont
First published by Verso 2015
© Matthew Beaumont 2015
Foreword and afterword © Will Self 2015
Some sections of Chapters 13 and 14 were first published in different form
as ‘The Mystery of Master Humphrey: Dickens, Nightwalking and The Old
Curiosity Shop’, in the Review of English Studies 65 (2013), pp. 118–36.
p. 1: From London Night by John Morrison and Harold Burkedin, 1934
p. 73: ‘A Most Wicked Work of a Wretched Witch’, printed by Richard Burt,
c. 1592 (woodcut), English School (sixteenth century) /
© Lambeth Palace Library, London, UK / Bridgeman Images p. 109: ‘Times of the Day: Night’, from The
Works of William Hogarth,
1833 (litho), William Hogarth (1697–1764) Private Collection
Ken Welsh / Bridgeman Images p. 261: ‘Colinet’s Fond Desire to Know Strange Lands’, illustration from
Dr Thorton’s The Pastorals of Virgil (woodcut), William Blake (1757–1827) /
Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK / Bridgeman Images All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
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www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-795-6 (HB)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-796-3 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-797-0 (UK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Electra by MJ & N
Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Will Self
Introduction: Midnight Streets
PART ONE
1 Crime and the Common Nightwalker: The Middle Ages and After
2 Idle Wandering Persons: Roisterers and Rogues in the Early Modern Period
3 Affairs that Walk at Midnight: Shakespeare, Dekker & Co.
PART TWO
4 Darkness Visible: Night and the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century
5 The Nocturnal Picaresque: Dunton, Ward and their Descendants
6 Grub Street at Night: Churchill, Goldsmith and Pattison
7 Midnight Rambles: Savage and Johnson
PART THREE
8 Night on the Lengthening Road: Wordsworth, Clare and Romantic Vagrancy
9 London’s Darkness: William Blake
10 The Nocturnal Labyrinth: Thomas De Quincey
PART FOUR
11 Crowded Streets, Empty Streets: The Early Nineteenth-Century City at Night
12 The Dead Night: Dickens’s Night Walks
13 A Darkened Walk: The Old Curiosity Shop and Dickens’s Fiction
14 Conclusion: The Man of the Crowd
Afterword by Will Self
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
T
he Leverhulme Trust funded the research on which this book is based and,
first and foremost, I’d like to thank this institution for its generosity in awarding
me a Research Fellowship in 2012–13. At a time when scholarly activity is more
and more instrumentalized, more and more closely monitored, the Leverhulme
Trust is exemplary for the freedom and independence it affords the academics
whose scholarship it sponsors. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to those who
supported my application: Rachel Bowlby, Terry Eagleton, Kate Flint, Colin
Jones and Jo McDonagh.
My thanks go to the following for making reading suggestions, inviting me
to present my ideas in the form of papers and lectures, or, more generally,
providing me with encouragement and support in this project: Tariq Ali,
Rosemary Ashton, Jo Barratt, Tim Beasley-Murray, Amelia Beaumont, Joanna
Beaumont, Michael Beaumont, Sebastian Budgen, Ardis Butterfield, Stephen
Cadywold, Ben Campkin, Warren Carter, Gregory Claeys, Holly Clayson, Oskar
Cox Jensen, Greg Dart, Paul Davis, Joseph Drury, Ger Duijzings, Geoff Dyer,
Gavin Everall, Mark Ford, Anita Garfoot, Helen Hackett, Andrew Hemingway,
Clive Holtham, Philip Horne, Ludo Hunter-Tilney, Colin Jones, Natalie Jones,
Tom Keymer, Roland-François Lack, Eric Langley, Andy Leask, Rob Maslen,
Jo McDonagh, China Miéville, John Mullan, Andrew Murray, Lynda Nead,
Katherine Osborne, Francesca Panetta, William Raban, Neil Rennie, Jo
Robinson, Will Self, Jane Shallice, Natasha Shallice, Bill Sharpe, Alison Shell,
Nick Shepley, Nick Shrimpton, Chris Stamatakis, Gabriel Stebbing, Hugh
Stevens, Matthew Sweet, Jeremy Tambling, John Timberlake, Sara Thornton,
Susan Watkins, Abigail Williams and Henry Woudhuysen. Those friends,
colleagues and acquaintances who made reading recommendations relating to
nightwalking in the later nineteenth or twentieth centuries will, I’m afraid, have
to be thanked in the sequel to this book.
For reading chapters in draft form and offering perceptive and constructive
criticism, I am especially grateful to Michael Beaumont, Greg Dart, Paul Davis,
Helen Hackett, Ludo Hunter-Tilney, Jo McDonagh, Nick Papadimitriou and
Chris Stamatakis. Above all, I am grateful to Will Self, who read the entire book
in draft form and whose support throughout its composition has been of
incalculable importance to me.
Tom Penn commissioned this book, though he has since moved to Penguin,
and I’d like to record my heartfelt gratitude to him. Leo Hollis inherited the
project, but his commitment to it has been unstinting and in his reading of the
manuscript he has been as encouraging as he has been penetrating – I could not
have hoped for a better editor. My sincere thanks, too, to Mark Martin, in
Verso’s New York offices, for overseeing the book’s production so efficiently;
and to Charles Peyton for his judicious copyediting.
Finally, for accompanying me on nightwalks in London and its fringes on
various occasions over the last couple of years, I owe special thanks to Ludo
Hunter-Tilney, Nick Papadimitriou, Will Self and David Young. These walks,
and the meandering conversations that accompanied them, have influenced this
book in ways that, though perhaps not immediately apparent, have nonetheless
been of crucial importance. ‘This page too’, as the poet Octavio Paz wrote in his
‘Nocturno de San Ildefonso’, is a ramble through the night.
The book is dedicated, with all my love, and in admiration, to my sons
Jordan and Aleem Beaumont.
Foreword
By Will Self
I
n the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, having encountered each other en
passant earlier in the day, the novel’s two protagonists are finally thrown
together. Seated with a bunch of rowdy medical students and their assorted
hangers-on in the hall of Dublin’s Holles Street maternity hospital, Leopold
Bloom’s paternal feelings are aroused by the spectacle of Stephen Dedalus who,
while surpassing eloquent, is nonetheless sinking deep into his cups. As Mrs
Purefoy struggles through the endgame of her three-day labour in the ward
above, so the novel’s narrative struggles through chronologically successive
English prose styles, from alliterative Anglo-Saxon to the rambunctious
discursiveness of Dickens. The familiar analysis of these parodies is that they are
a conflation of ontogeny and phylogeny: just as the Purefoy baby’s gestation is
assumed (by Joyce, in line with the scientific thinking of the day) to have
recapitulated the stages of human evolution. So the text itself undergoes
mutagenesis: its physiology and morphology altering to adapt to changed
environments.
But if Mrs Purefoy gives birth to an infant, what precisely is it that the
contractions and dilations of Joyce’s prose give birth to? In part, it is to an
actualization of the paternal feeling that Bloom has towards Stephen. But this
sentiment finds its fuller expression in what they do together, which is to walk –
specifically, to nightwalk. First, seriatim, they proceed to Mrs Bella Cohen’s