Night Walks by Charles Dickens

A wonderful premise, this is a collection of stories, essays, and observations written under the guise of Dickens’s insomniac walking around London.

Not so much an article of psychological self-exploration, but a really beautiful piece of social commentary. There’s gritty poverty, London history, health, and politics. Sadly, some of the bits about social apathy and poverty still feel fresh almost 200 years later.

A short but very thought provoking read, a good addition to the Dickens canon. You can really sense the “characters” behind some of these sketches.

Shout out to these lovely Penguin Great Ideas editions, there’s many many treats in here…