We were hoping for something of more substance from the great Wen Chang.

The Great Wen is a disparaging nickname for London.

The development of the Great Wen over 400 years, examined as a quasi-biological explosion that everyone feared and no one could curtail.

Indeed, the only surprise may be about how little, if at all, the novelist exaggerated when he depicted the misery of the poor of the Great Wen in books such as Oliver Twist or Our Mutual Friend.

He is only the latest in a long line of literary pacers of the Great Wen, as Matthew Beaumont reveals in Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (Verso, £20), which navigates a course charted by insomniac authors both famous and forgotten.