Beaumont draws on multiple literary sources in his paean to the joys of thinking while pounding the city streets
In a scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom walks to and from a butcher’s shop in Dublin in the early morning, his imagination roaming freely from the local (the shops and pubs he passes) to the exotic (eucalyptus groves in Turkey). Likewise, Mrs Dalloway, in Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, strolls through London’s St James’s Park and Piccadilly, her thoughts and memories prompted – and continually distracted – by the capital’s bustle.
The city was a primary locus of the modernist novel of the 1920s and 30s, an often diverting environment that, when traversed on foot, was nevertheless conducive to reflection, even self-reflection. It was left to a poet, TS Eliot, however, to evoke its alienating effect on the individual psyche. In The Waste Land, the sight of hordes of rush-hour commuters striding purposefully to work over London Bridge symbolises the city’s soul-sapping conformity. “So many,” writes Eliot, “I had not thought death had undone so many.”