In Nightwalking Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London-popul
ated by the poor, the mad, the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. He 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 t
hrong, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal ci
ty has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others.
