From Dickensian London to today’s megacities—what urban walking tells us about modern life
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-nineteenth 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?
About the Author
Matthew Beaumont is a Professor in the Department of English at University College, London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or co-edited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble; Adventures in Realism; and Restless Cities.
Industry Reviews
“Matthew Beaumont’s prose is the golden thread of elegance and erudition we need to guide us through the labyrinth of the modern city. These essays confirm him to be simultaneously the possessor of a coherent and convincing overview of emergent Modernist thought and creativity in the urban context, and the inheritor of all the radical subjectivities he engages with. This is a superb and always engrossing collection.”
Will Self, author of Psychogeography
“[The Walker] is an erudite book that moves at a pace alternating between brisk and leisurely … Like his prose, Beaumont’s mind is anything but pedestrian. He is as attuned to matters of medicine and science, anthropology, economics, philosophy and psychology as he is to literature and the visual arts … Beaumont uses the language of contemporary literary theory, but with none of the rebarbative jargon-mongering of others in the professoriate. His references to the usual suspects—from Marx, Freud and Adorno through Lacan and Derrida, to Deleuze and Guattari, Žižek and Agamben—are never gratuitous, but always helpful in understanding the literary, historical, and psychological terrain he explores.”
Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal
“[The Walker] is absolutely fascinating and [Beaumont’s] literary references are wonderful … I absolutely loved it.”
Jo Good, BBC Radio London
“The Walker seeks to take its reader on an intriguing journey … if you’re looking for some escapism that goes beyond the clichés of repetitive travel literature, this could well be the book for you.”
Northern Soul
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