ABSTRACT
IT IS COMMON knowledge that Dickens had a lifelong passion for walking, that city streets were his favourite haunt and night his favourite time for taking to them, and that these walks have some special significance for his creative powers. Probably the most familiar evidence is provided by Forster in a series of letters of 1846 describing the difficulties attending the simultaneous composition of D om bey and Son and The Battle o f L ife. They complain of psychological and physical distress caused by the absence in Switzerland of busy streets to walk in:
I can’t express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toll and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!! (August 30)
The absence of any accessible streets continues to worry me, now that I have so much to do, in a most singular manner. It is quite a little mental phenomenon. I should not want them in the day time, if they were here, I dare say: but at night I want them beyond description. I don’t seem able to lose my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds. (Sept. 20)
There are no streets and crowds of people here, to divert the attention. My head suffers, and that is very unusual, as you know, with me. (Sept. 25)
I still am made uneasy by occasional giddiness and headache: attributable, I have not the least doubt, to the absence of streets. (Oct. 3)1
This significant material can sustain a variety of interpretations. It suggests most obviously a psychological approach: streetwalking seems to have functioned for Dickens as a therapeutic outlet for tension at times of uncommon labour or anxiety. ‘Night Walks’ in The Uncommercial Traveller claims that a bout of sleeplessness was cured ‘by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise’ (UT , 127)2; the restlessness of 1854, when Dickens was contemplating separation from his wife, found similar relief (‘if I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish’); and even in the case of colds Dickens found it doubtful that staying
indoors ‘does me half the good of a dozen miles in the snow.’3 But in this essay I shall be concerned less with the psychological aspect of Dickens’s street-walking habits than with their broader, more sociological implications, which have significance, I think, for the art of the novels.
