Review of Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking

This paper will examine the essay, “Night Walks” (2000), to see how Charles Dickens (1812-1870), a social-realist writer of the Victorian era, has used elements adapted from the Romantics in order to draw attention to the pitiable social conditions of Victorian London. Dickens’ the realist paradoxically reflected a readiness to think and feel “without immediate external excitement”. He expressed his alignment with Romanticism by way of a cultivation of feeling and empathizing. His genius was, as expressed by Bagehot, “essentially irregular and unsymmetrical” because he was “utterly deficient in the faculty of reasoning”. His daily, or rather nightly walks provided him with the inspiration to follow the Romantic tradition of writing on walks. The essay under consideration, “Night Walks”, clearly supports the notion that Romanticism was fallaciously opposed to realism. The paper will examine the ways in which the theme, style, and structure of the essay evoke the preoccupation of a Romantic soul—for whom the walk becomes a space for “encounter and reflection”—and the Romantic mind which is empowered by “imaginative self definition or discovery”.

Brill, 2016

Gas lighting in nineteenth century London transformed the night into a modern uncanny site. The same city familiar in the day, bathed in gas light, became threatening and strange. In this chapter I will attempt to configure the night in relation to two aspects-as spectacle or visual consumption; and as giving rise to the uncanny, or a modern anxiety about the un/familiar in the city. I will utilize the Freudian concept of unheimlich to uncover what undergoes repression in London's modernizing measures in the Victorian era and how it is recorded in literature. The uncanny according to Freud is the familiar made strange. It is caused when there is what Lacan calls an irruption of the real in the imaginary field. Because this mode of brief or sudden recognition is released as distortion it is felt through the framework of dread or anxiety. For Freud this is pivotal-'everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light'. This mode of symbolic excavation tells us important things about material that often exists as peripheral in the novelization of the city. For example, the displacement of the urban poor and emergent ideas of sexual danger for middle class women in the night is unravelled as contingencies the literary metropolis bases itself on. The nineteenth century consolidated ideas of sexual danger which made women's participation in the night life a fraught and complex terrain. The night is demarcated in ways that does not make its space available to everybody in a uniform manner. Who are the people who can inhabit the night, in order to talk about it? And if the night enhances a sense of urban alienation, is it felt by all subjects in the same manner? My chapter will investigate these ideas through Charles Dickens' Bleak House.

Critical Quarterly, 2015

But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him. John 11: 10 'The Pedestrian' (1951) is a science-fiction short story by Ray Bradbury about a man who, after nightfall, roams aimlessly and compulsively about the silent streets of a nameless metropolis. It is set in a totalitarian society at the midpoint of the twentyfirst century, roughly a hundred years after it was written. In Bradbury's dystopian parableit is a satirical portrait of Los Angeles that, because of its bleak attack on urban alienation, continues to resonatethe supremacy of the automobile has made it impossible in practice to be a pedestrian. Indeed, the police state has in effect proscribed pedestrianism. So, in this far from distant future, no one travels by foot. Except, of course, the Pedestrian. 'To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o'clock of a misty evening in November,' the story begins, 'to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do.' Mead, whose name gently reinforces the pastoral associations of those 'grassy seams' that furrow the pavement, generally begins his nightwalks at an intersection, because from there he can 'peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go'. But the point is that, 'alone in this world of A.D. 2053, or as good as alone,' it doesn't matter which direction he takes. 1 So he relishes selecting a route at random, thinking of it as a 'path' rather than an avenue or road. He is halfconsciously creating what Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, in their recent celebration of the 'edgelands' that characterize the uncertain border between cities and the surrounding countryside, have classified as 'desire paths'. These are 'lines of footfall worn into the ground' that transform the ordered, centralized spaces of the city into secret pockets; and that, in so doing, offer a 'subtle resistance to the dead hand of the planner'. 2 Once he has decided on a direction, Mead strides off along his desire path, then, at once purposeful and purposeless. 'Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house.' Mead has never encountered another living creature on these nighttime walks. Nor has he so much as glimpsed another pedestrian in the daytime, because people travel exclusively by car. 'In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time.' 3 The reason for the eerie solitude of the city at night is that everyone else has carefully secluded themselves in their living rooms in order to stare blankly and obediently at television screens. So if there is no political curfew in place in Bradbury's dystopian society then this is because a kind of cultural curfew renders it superfluous.

What is it in the madman’s quest that draws some of us into its circuit? Suspending any diagnosis, but having an unromantic respect for the brutish relentlessness of the psychotic treadmill, I will refer this question back to those who seem nevertheless impelled to stray into this uncharted territory. Is this a way of intensifying the vagabond symptomatology of our own houseless minds? Don’t we risk becoming mad ourselves in the process? In responding to these questions I will look for guidance, first of all, to what the mad drifter might map out for us, his drifting being often at once physical and mental. In order to say something about this, I cannot disregard the foundational theoretical geography which Freud and Lacan have already laid out for us. But, with the connivance of such aberrant artist-philosophers as Dickens and Deleuze, I will continue to look awry. This, finally, will lead to some thoughts about that most singular becoming-mad which some pursue in taking an analysis to the very end, and even beyond.

Early Modern Low Countries, 2023

Several theories claim that the rhythms of daily life changed dramatically in the late eighteenth century under the influence of the advent of street lighting. New technologies made it possible to work longer hours during the evening, enjoy a dash of leisure time or otherwise stay active. People thus slowly but surely "colonized" the night. By collecting fresh empirical data from the eyewitness accounts of the local criminal court in Antwerp, we subject this theory to a thorough investigation. The findings show that there was no real increase in nocturnalization because Antwerpers – even without new street lamps – remained active for a long time anyway. They usually continued working long after sunset or had time for leisure. Sleep was limited to the biological minimum. A deviant rhythm in which people remained active until the wee hours of the morning and only got up well after sunrise was reserved for a small group of people who either belonged to the absolute cream of the crop or to the fringes of society.

2015

This article explores Charles Dickens’s unusual characterisation of vagrant figures in his novel Bleak House. Dickens conceived of the vagrant as a public entity without any recourse to private spaces—a thesis here supported by the novel and a series of satellite texts by Dickens, Henry Mayhew and Edwin Chadwick. This conception, in turn, was both a reflection, and a perceived cause, of the vagrant’s intellectual, moral and physical degeneration. Beginning with a brief overview of vagrancy in the nineteenth-century before moving on to a discussion about Dickens’s atypical depiction of vagrant characters, this paper examines both the public presentation of vagrants and the dangers that they were perceived to pose to society at large. In doing this it seeks to unpick how one of the great Victorian social critics perceived the problem of nineteenth-century vagrancy and its social ramifications.

A pen portrait of the vitality and energy of eighteenth-century urban life, with special reference to the city streets.

Partial Answers-journal of Literature and The History of Ideas, 2011

Part of the pleasure of reading Dickens comes from the experience of movement through the city. The narrative voice guides the reader through the urban landscape of Dickens's fiction in tandem with its characters -Kate and Nicholas moving with Mrs. Nickleby through London in search of a place to live; Amy Dorrit leaving the Marshalsea and traveling to Mrs. Clennam's through a kaleidoscope of London (notably in the recent BBC adaptation; see Paganoni); or the narrator of Sketches seeing old clothes come to life on Monmouth Street, bringing their wearers to life through imagination that sets a model for reading. 1 The dynamic experience of reading generates a living cityscape 2 which yields complex vicarious emotions -the settling in of comfort as well as the surprise of fear, the excitement of a desired encounter, or the terror at the discovery of the stalker. These contradictory feelings often accompany the cognitive dissonance of the urban scene, which becomes both the condition for experience and expression of its multiplicities. Dickens moves the reader through events -psychic, political, social, or communal; his plots become the grammar of his urban language, his settings the syntax for bridging the divides of class, gender, age, and profession. It is no exaggeration to say (see, e.g., Schwarzbach, Sicher) that this dynamic city trope is the central character of his fiction. In contrast to the negative judgment of the city ("God made the country, man made the town"), Dickens represents the city as the default modern condition but not as a given: his city is in process of transformation, in its splendor 1 Like a musical score, these episodes create the effect of counterpoint, as if we were hearing the call and return of an oral storyteller. On the power of storytelling as against the written text see Benjamin. See also Baumgarten 1983 for a discussion of the power of storytelling in the Dickensian narrative.

Victorian Inclusion and Exclusion, 13th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA), University of Greenwich, 14-16 July 2021