{"product_id":"9781781687956-secondhand-nightwalking-a-nocturnal-history-of-london","title":"Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London","description":"\"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,\" wrote the poet  Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a  very different place to the one we know today - home to the lost, the  vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative  history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on  the streets when the sun's down. If nightwalking is a matter of \"going  astray\" in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers  represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the  neglected and forgotten aspects of the city. In this brilliant  work of literary investigation, Beaumont 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 throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We  discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm  or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place  divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where  the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets. With a foreword and afterword by Will Self,  Nightwalkin g is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49176476123355,"sku":"9781781687956-SECONDHAND","price":20.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/b5d6f238-1691-421d-a047-38f8e2b2f033.jpg?v=1787571976","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/9781781687956-secondhand-nightwalking-a-nocturnal-history-of-london","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}