ABSTRACT
Walking and writing were intimately entwined activities for Dickens, and city streets held a vital place in his imagination. As G.K. Chesterton put it, ‘Dickens himself had, in the most sacred and serious sense of the term, the key to the street … [for] [h]is earth was the stones of the street; his stars were the lamps of the street; his hero was the man in the street.’1 So it is hardly surprising that Household Words, published from premises in Wellington Street just off the Strand, is so preoccupied with its metropolitan setting. However, it was not Dickens, but Sala, who wrote the article entitled ‘The Key of the Street’ that appeared in Household Words on 6 September 1851. It was this narrative of his ‘enforced perambulations of the thoroughfares of the metropolis’ that first brought Sala to Dickens’s attention and led to his regular employment as a contributor.2 He shared his mentor’s compulsive interest in the life of the streets and many of the pieces that he wrote for Household Words are tales of the flâneur-that connoisseur of the urban environment who renders the city as a spectacle for consumption in his journalistic sketches.3
