The Society of Night Walkers - An Epistolary Community
One of the most compelling discoveries within the Bennet Archive is not a single document, but the emergent shape of a hidden intellectual community. It was a society with no formal charter, no meetings, and no name until Bradbury Bennet himself coined one in a letter to Mrs. Finch: The Society of Night Walkers. This epistolary triangle, with Bennet as its hub, connected three brilliant but isolated minds: Bennet in the quietude of Somerset, Adelaide Finch in the drawing-room artifice of London, and Alaric Thorne amidst the industrial din of Manchester.
Their fellowship existed entirely on paper, a shared sanctuary built from ink and postage, offering a powerful counter-narrative to the public intellectual life of the Victorian era.
Formation of the Circle
The society formed organically. The foundational link was the correspondence between Bradbury Bennet and Mrs. Adelaide Finch, which began in the early 1840s. Theirs was a meeting of minds predicated on a shared, melancholic scepticism towards the world’s follies.
The triangle was completed in 1845 with the arrival of Mr. Alaric Thorne. After Bennet initiated a correspondence regarding Thorne’s technical treatise on metal fatigue, he quickly discovered a mind that fused engineering precision with a deep, romantic sensibility. Thorne, a civil engineer, described his method of study as taking long, solitary walks through the sleeping industrial city, listening to the “symphony of iron and steam.” In an early letter, he referred to himself as a mere “night walker.”
Bennet immediately grasped the metaphorical power of this term. He saw that he, Mrs. Finch, and Mr. Thorne were all, in their own ways, solitary observers navigating a metaphorical “night.” As he wrote to Mrs. Finch in October 1846:
“The more I reflect upon it, the more I realise how perfectly it captures our own state of being. For him, the night is a sleeping Manchester of machines; for us, it is a waking Society of men… We move unseen, solitary observers in a landscape at once alien and yet the only one we possess.”
The Three Domains of Observation
With Bennet serving as the discreet intermediary, the three “Night Walkers” began to share observations from their respective domains. None knew the other’s full identity, only their designated sphere of study.
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The Night of Nature (Bradbury Bennet): From his Somerset estate, Bennet provided the baseline—the observable, rational world of natural philosophy. He described the predictable logic of the seasons, the meticulous mechanics of an insect’s wing, and the quiet beauty of a landscape shrouded in fog. His world was the control group against which the other two could be measured.
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The Night of Society (Adelaide Finch): Anonymised by Bennet as his “London lady” or “our metropolitan correspondent,” Mrs. Finch provided sharp, often satirical, reports from the artificial night of the London salon. She catalogued the “anatomy of credulity,” dissecting the absurdities of spiritualist séances and the intellectual theatre of her husband’s mesmerism demonstrations.
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The Night of Industry (Alaric Thorne): Referred to as “our friend in Manchester,” Thorne offered a vision of the new, fiery night of the Industrial Revolution. He provided Bennet with powerful mechanical metaphors, but also with his unique observations on “acoustic geography”—his attempt to classify the sounds of the industrial city into a complex, brutal symphony. He described the rhythmic beat of a steam-hammer (Malleus gravis) and the mournful cry of a train whistle (Vapor plorans) with the precision of a scientist cataloguing new species.
Significance
The Society of Night Walkers represents a form of private, decentralised intellectual inquiry. It was a safe harbour for sceptical minds in an age of fervent belief. Through their letters, they offered each other not agreement, but perspective; not community in the physical sense, but the profound reassurance that other “lonely sentinels” were on watch.
For Bennet, facilitating this exchange was perhaps the most significant act of his life. It allowed him to move beyond mere observation into a role of quiet curation, weaving together three disparate strands of Victorian experience into a single, coherent, and deeply compelling intellectual tapestry.
Editor’s Note: The term “Society of Night Walkers” was Bennet’s own, used only in his private letters to Mrs. Finch. It was never used in his correspondence with Thorne. This underscores the deeply personal and almost secret nature of the intellectual bond he felt among the three of them. Dr. E. Reed