Georgetown Peabody Library

Nightwalking, a nocturnal history of London Chaucer to Dickens, Matthew Beaumont

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Nightwalking

bibliography

900609015

Matthew Beaumont

a nocturnal history of London Chaucer to Dickens

""Nightwalking is, in both the physical and the moral meanings of the term, deviant. At night, in other words, the idea of wandering cannot be dissociated from the idea of erring - wanderring. This elision or semantic slurring is present in the final lines of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), where the poet offers a glimpse, for perpetuity, of Adam and Eve, after their expulsion from Paradise, entering the post-lapsarian world on foot: 'They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.' Wandering steps. In a double sense, Adam and Eve are errant: at once itinerant and aberrant. They are condemned to a life of ceaseless, restless sinfulness. ""--, Provided by publisher

I : 1 Crime and the common nightwalker: the middle ages and after ; 2 Idle wandering persons: roisterers and ogues in the early modern period ; 3 Affairs that walk at midnight: Shakespeare, Dekker & co. -- II 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 -- III 8 Night on the lengthening road: Wordsworth, Clare and romantic vagrancy ; 9 London's darkness: William Blake ; 10 The nocturnal labyrinth: Thomas De Quincey -- IV 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