This talk will offer an introductory overview of the history of London at night through the mysterious, semi-criminal figure of the nightwalker, all the way from the Middle Ages to the present. In the late 13th century the ‘common nightwalker’ was a legal entity, a vagrant or prostitute that the nightwatch attempted to cleanse from the streets after curfew, but from the 18th century, and the rise of nightlife, it came increasingly to describe the identity of bohemian poets and others who slummed it on the streets in order to excavate the underside of the Enlightenment city, revealing the emptiness of its boast to be supremely civilized. The talk will celebrate the nightwalk as a way of encountering another city, and another self.
Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or co-edited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble; Adventures in Realism; and Restless Cities.