Nightwalking ─ A Nocturnal History of London: Chaucer to Dickens

""Nightwalking is, in both the physical and the moral meanings of the term, deviant. At night, in other words, the idea of wandering cannot be dissociated from the idea of erring - wanderring. This elision or semantic slurring is present in the final lines of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), where the poet offers a glimpse, for perpetuity, of Adam and Eve, after their expulsion from Paradise, entering the post-lapsarian world on foot: 'They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.' Wandering steps. In a double sense, Adam and Eve are errant: at once itinerant and aberrant. They are condemned to a life of ceaseless, restless sinfulness. ""--

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College London. He is the author ofUtopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, ofThe Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has also editedRestless Cities (2010). He lives and walks in London.