The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City

Matthew Beaumont

2020 aza. · Verso Books

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From Charles Dickens’ London to today’s megacities, a fascinating exploration of what urban walking tells us about modern life—for fans of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and literary history.

“A labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking,” as seen in the lives and works of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ray Bradbury, and other literary greats (Guardian).

There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-19th century.

From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.

Through these writings, Beaumont asks: Can you get lost in a crowd? What are the consequences of using your smartphone in the street? What differentiates the nocturnal metropolis from the city of daylight? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? And can we save the city—or ourselves—by taking to the pavement?

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Matthew Beaumont is a professor in the Department of English at University College, London. He is the the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue, and co-editor of Restless Cities. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. He lives in London.