Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword Will Self ix
Introduction: Midnight Streets 1
Part 1
1 Crime and the Common Nightwalker: The Middle Ages and After 15
2 Idle Wandering Persons: Roisterers and Rogues in the Early Modern Period 43
3 Affairs that Walk at Midnight: Shakespeare, Dekker & Co. 73
Part 2
4 Darkness Visible: Night and the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century 109
5 The Nocturnal Picaresque: Dunton, Ward and their Descendants 141
6 Grub Street at Night: Churchill, Goldsmith and Pattison 169
7 Midnight Rambles: Savage and Johnson 195
Part 3
8 Night on the Lengthening Road: Wordsworth, Clare and Romantic Vagrancy 227
9 London's Darkness: William Blake 261
10 The Nocturnal Labyrinth: Thomas De Quincey 297
Part 4
11 Crowded Streets, Empty Streets: The Lady Nineteenth-Century City at Night 323
12 The Dead Night: Dickens's Night Walks 347
13 A Darkened Walk: The Old Curiosity Shop and Dickens's Fiction 375
14 Conclusion: The Man of the Croud 401
Afterword Will Self 411
Notes 415
Index 471