The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered

by Peter Davidson

Offering a combination of place-writing, memoir, and cultural study, Peter Davidson examines the motif of the lighted window.
 
Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire. These are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling image of the lighted window. In this innovative book, Peter Davidson is our guide, taking us on atmospheric walks through nocturnal cities in Britain, Europe, North America, and the field paths of rural England.

Surveying a wide range of material, the book extends from early romantic painting to contemporary fiction. Davidson features familiar lighted windows in English literature, turning to the works of poets such as Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold and the novels of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Kenneth Grahame. The Lighted Window also considers the painted nocturnes of James Whistler, John Atkinson Grimshaw, and the ruralist Samuel Palmer; Japanese prints of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Proust and the painters of the French belle époque; René Magritte’s L’Empire des Lumières ; and North American painters such as Edward Hopper and Linden Frederick.

By interpreting the interactions of art, literature, and geography around this evocative motif, Peter Davidson shows how the lighted window has inspired an extraordinary variety of moods and ideas, from the romantic period to the present day.

Genres: Nonfiction, London

224 pages, Hardcover

Published December 2, 2021

Reviews

[Kimberly Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this book was a little opaque at times, and I wish the reproduction of the paintings had been higher quality, this book made me think and will stick with me. It introduced me to writers and painters I had never heard of. It made me want to buy some candles and take a long night time walk. It made me yearn for an old house in a setting thick with history. Interesting that, after touching on all the night time settings that it misses the dramatic skylines of our major cities. I wanted to add a paragraph about the six months I lived on the 11th floor of a downtown Minneapolis high rise. The city lights were all right there outside my bedroom window. So beautiful and dramatic it was hard to sleep. And a midwinter blizzard just heightened the drama of the scene, contrasting so completely with my cozy apartment alive with small children.

[RFChilcott · Rating 5 out of 5]

My sister gave me this book during the COVID pandemic, and it was the perfect lockdown meditation. Read a chapter when you can’t sleep - it calms the worrying mind.

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every once in a while, the title of a book grabs me. When I read the title of this one, I was reminded of walking with a friend in Manhattan on an early December evening 35 years ago, or so. She pointed out to me that we could look into uncurtained windows and get a glimpse of other people's homes. It was an upscale neighborhood - I have no memory where it was, but I recall getting a sense of how the other half lived - and I also recall that my feelings were a combination of both interest and guilt for being a voyeur.
As to the book itself, it's something of a mixed bag. On the plus side, it's bound beautifully and is printed on thick luxurious (probably expensive) paper, and it includes some fine writing by a number of writers, including the author, describing the sights of evening walks (mostly in England). On the minus side, it includes many paintings which Davidson fits into the subject matter of his book, but which are, for the most part, reproduced in such small-scale fashion that I had to struggle to make out some of the details that the author mentions and which, if he hadn't mentioned them, I wouldn't have noticed at all.
Reading it, I felt that I was reading two books. One was written for someone like myself who had experienced something of what the title suggests. The other was a book written for scholars. When the writing tended toward the former, I was often enthralled. When it tended toward the latter, I tended to tune out.

In the end, I was both pleased and unhappy with the book. Luckily, I was able to read a library copy. Otherwise, I might have ordered it out of curiosity and would have been somewhat disappointed.

"What an extraordinary succession of rooms presented themselves in the lighted windows of early evening; perhaps them most surprising came very near the beginning of the Rapenbug, just past the antique shop with polychrome statues in the window, a mysterious shop which was never open."
Reading this short passage, brought memories of one of my favorite books, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier.