In one of his memorandum book entries from 1857, Dickens sketched out a plan for writing about the city in a new way. “Representing London – or Paris, or any great place – in the light of being actually unknown to all the people in the story”, he noted, could perhaps be done by adopting the “fears and fancies and opinions” of those who lived there, revealing the city to be “an odd unlikeness of itself”. In some ways he was hoping to achieve in fiction what he had already spent many hours doing in person. An obsessive walker, he already knew exactly how to experience the city’s shadowy secret self. He simply had to wait until sunset and step out into the night.
As Matthew Beaumont points out in the introduction to this lively and learned study, it is at night that London reveals its true strangeness. Away from the “sodium gleam” of street lamps and the strip lights of minicab offices, there are alleys where “the darkness appears to collect in a solid, faintly palpitating mass”. Occasionally it takes on the form of a skulking fox, but otherwise it remains full of mystery and a vague sense of threat. Within it live some of the other city dwellers who paradoxically become most visible when it is darkest: “The lost, the lonely … The sleepless, the homeless. All the city’s internal exiles.”
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