Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London by Matthew Beaumont (review)

For Matthew Beaumont, in this fascinating literary and cultural history of nightwalking, Dickens represents something like the culmination of a tradition stretching back to at least the middle ages, when night was legally defined as a separate sphere, and those who trespassed against the daily curfew (beginning between 8 and 10 pm) were subject to persecution and arrest. It is this social and cultural division between the nocturnal and the diurnal that Beaumont is interested in tracing, and especially in identifying those more or less marginalized figures who walked at night in London, the “great wen” as Cobbett called it, where night-time was at once an ordeal (or refuge) for the poor and a playground for the rich. Dickens’s Master Humphrey is one such nightwalker, who wanders “by night and day, at all hours and seasons, in city streets and quiet country parts” (385), making him, like many others in this book, “the victim of popular prejudices about men of slightly odd appearance who walk about the metropolis at night because they do not feel at home in it during the day” (385). His fading from view after the opening chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop is lamented by Beaumont, for whom “Dickens squandered a subtle and insidiously unsettling sense of moral and psychological danger when he expelled Master Humphrey” (390). Perhaps the major success of Nightwalking is its excavation, across a period of five hundred years, of the historical and cultural conditions that allowed this sense of “moral and psychological danger” which Dickens partially suppressed to attach itself to the nightwalker in Britain.

Beaumont pursues his investigation chronologically in four parts, with the medieval and early-modern origins of the nightwalker as the topic of part one. The phrase “common nightwalker,” he demonstrates, was originally applied equally to men and women, only later coming to specifically designate female prostitution (16). From at least 1285 the act of nightwalking was criminalized irrespective of any illicit activity, so that “Anyone on the streets [at night] with no good reason was automatically liable to arrest” (19). Nighttime activity thus came to demarcate the line between the respectable and the non-respectable citizen, although “good reputation” (31) could also be used as a justification for appearing outside after curfew, so that the law served primarily to victimize the poor, unemployed and indigent, who were feared by those with wealth and property. Beaumont later argues that this class distinction can be used to divide nightwalkers into two main groups. “Noctambulants” (136), a term coined around 1700, were those “at the upper end of the social scale,” who “made excursions into the nocturnal streets because they had chosen to do so” (138), while “noctivagants” (138) were those who had no choice but to walk the streets at night, such as “the destitute, the unemployed and unemployable, the indigent, the aged” (138). One figure firmly in the first category was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who in 1543 blazed a trail of destruction across Cheapside with a group of friends, smashing windows, shouting obscenities and throwing stones at prostitutes (45–46). While in prison following this event, Surrey wrote a “Satire against the Citizens of London,” attacking the sins of which he was himself a part (48), and hence providing a typically complex example of the subject positions Beaumont interrogates. Though Beaumont attempts to uncover the stories of female nightwalkers, his writers are usually male, and often significant literary figures, such as Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker, the latter of whom wrote pamphlets following the journeys of an imagined “Bellman” (91), (or nightwatchman), which were at least partly on the side of the watchman’s nightwalker quarry.

Part two begins with William Hogarth’s painting “Night” (1736), described by Beaumont as one of the greatest illustrations of the eighteenth-century “nightmare” (112) of Enlightenment’s collapse into chaos and unreason, a fear which according to Foucault haunted the period. The century was also marked by the colonization of the...