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There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker.
From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?
About the author
Matthew Beaumont, a Professor of English Literature at University College London, is the author of several books for Verso, including
Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015),
The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020) and
How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body (forthcoming, 2024). He is also the author of
Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night (2021). For Verso, he has co-authored
The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009) and co-edited
Restless Cities (2010).
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Nothing less than a grand unifying theory of the counter-enlightenment. Will Self [in praise of Nightwalking]
