This post has been contributed by Edward Grimble.

Writing to his friend—and later biographer—John Forster in 1854, Dickens confessed that ‘if I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish’ (Letters, vol 7, 429). Throughout his life Dickens remained a dizzyingly energetic pedestrian, and very often his fiction is at its most extraordinary when dealing with this apparently banal and quotidian activity. Think, for instance, of the insomniac doctor Allan Woodcourt, the predatory Barnaby Rudge, Sr, or the melancholic Sydney Carton—in almost all of Dickens’s novels the reader finds at least one peculiar pedestrian who wanders, stalks, drifts or creeps through the streets. John Hollingshead, a journalist and theatre manager to whom Dickens gave work on Household Words, wrote of the latter’s proclivity for ‘violent walking’. ‘When [Dickens] was restless’, he wrote, ‘he would frequently get up and walk through the night over Waterloo Bridge, along the London, New Kent and Old Kent Roads, past all the towns on the Old Dover Road, until he came to his roadside dwelling’ (Hollingshead, vol 1, 101–102). In this piece, however, I will cross the Channel and examine Dickens’s writing from his time on the continent. In September 1846, Dickens wrote to Forster from Rosemont, the house in Lausanne to which he and his domestic entourage had moved earlier that year, lamenting that ‘the absence of any accessible streets continues to worry me’; ‘it is quite a little mental phenomenon’, he wrote (Letters, vol 4, 622). This is, I would suggest, something of an understatement. Walking, and particularly walking among streets and crowds, formed a complex and integral part of his writing life, and the anxiety surrounding the relationship between walking and working certainly never left him.

Rosemont, Lausanne. Forster 1.268. Image scan by Philip V. Allingham

The Dickens family arrived in Lausanne on 11 June, and after a few days’ house-hunting settled at Rosemont, a house standing ‘in a most lovely situation on the brink of the high slope that rises from the Lake’, surrounded by picturesque walks through vineyards, gardens and corn-fields (Letters, vol 4, 561–562). Dickens, anticipating that when he began writing he would ‘want streets sometimes’, took solace from the fact that Geneva was only twenty-four miles away, and that he could fly there if ever he needed to (Letters, vol 4, 560). On 28 June Dickens wrote triumphantly to Forster that, having freed himself of correspondence and other necessary tasks, he then ‘BEGAN DOMBEY!’, ‘plung[ing] straight over head and ears into the story’ (Letters, vol 4, 573). By 5 July, however, he found himself overcome by an ‘extraordinary nervousness’, with Forster commenting that Dickens was ‘feeling sometimes the want of streets’, a desire that would ‘come upon him after he had been writing all day’ (Letters, vol 4, 579). The need to walk the streets was inexorably bound to his writing work, but the relationship was complex, and ever-shifting. Whilst during this period writing Dombey and Son, ‘invention […] seem[ed] the easiest thing in the world’ to the author, he complained to Forster at the end of August of the ‘extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on FAST’ (Letters, vol 4, 612):

[T]he difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious: it is almost an impossibility. I suppose this is partly the effect of two years’ ease, and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. 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. (Letters, vol 4, 612)

Here, then, the streets stoked Dickens’s creativity, innervating his writing process in a way which was as ineffable as it was necessary. The ‘toil and labour’ of writing, day after day, without ‘that magic lantern’, vibrant and crowded city streets, is ‘IMMENSE’, he wrote (Letters, vol 4, 612). Fifteen years later, Charles Baudelaire would articulate these feelings in his seminal essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, as he describes the new hero of modernity who goes ‘everywhere in quest of the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day’, surrendering himself to the flow of the streets and their crowds, wandering and wondering (Baudelaire, 56). ‘My figures’, wrote Dickens, ‘seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them’, as if the irrepressible life of the metropolis held an animating power (Letters, vol 4, 613).

If, in Lausanne in the autumn of 1846, Dickens yearned for streets as somewhere to develop and exercise his characters, then he also suffered from an anxiety to exorcise them. By the end of September, he had written to Forster to express this incessant concern:

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 walk in 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 get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds. (Letters, vol 4, 622)

This is the image of the writer who seeks to flee from his fictional creations or, seen another way, it is a desire to abandon the writing self entirely. If the streets allowed Dickens to lose himself in darkness and anonymity, then they also facilitated a kind of fugue state, an abandonment of identity. As Ian Hacking writes in his fascinating Mad Travellers, these flights are ‘less a voyage of self-discovery than an attempt to eliminate self’; and in an 1860 essay entitled ‘Shy Neighbourhoods’, Dickens described the thirty-mile journey from central London out to Gad’s Hill, walking ‘without the slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming constantly’ (Hacking, 30; Journalism, vol 4, p. 118):

The road was so lonely in the night, that I fell asleep to the monotonous sound of my feet […] It was only when I made a stumble like a drunken man, or struck out into the road to avoid a horseman close upon the path—who had no existence—that I came to myself and looked about. (Journalism, vol 4, p. 118)

In this oneiric somnambulism interior and exterior worlds seem to collapse into each other, and Dickens appears to share the spectral horseman’s lack of existence, walking automatically in an only semi-conscious state. The correspondence above, in which Dickens strove to ‘get rid of my spectres’, also echoes those of a letter written to Forster in late 1840, during the composition of The Old Curiosity Shop, in which he complained of feeling ‘utterly dispirited and done up’; ‘all night’, he wrote, ‘I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I am unrefreshed and miserable’ (Letters, vol 2, 144). The Old Curiosity Shop, it has been remarked, is a novel which centres around the pursuit of the child, Little Nell; Dickens’s comments here take on an uncanny quality, as the roles of pursuer and pursued are reversed—rather than lose his ‘spectres’ in crowds, the author was inescapably haunted by his fictional figures as he roamed the streets.

Seeking liberation, then, Dickens seems to find only misery and restlessness. Whilst staying in Genoa, in November 1844, he wrote to Thomas Mitton of the effects that writing The Chimes had on his state of mind:

I have worn myself to Death, in the Month I have been at Work. None of my usual reliefs have been at hand; I have not been able to divest myself of the story—have suffered very much in my sleep, in consequence—and am so shaken by such work in this trying climate that I am nervous as a man who is dying of Drink: and as haggard as a Murderer. (Letters, vol 4, 211)

Simultaneously, Dickens is the self-destructive dipsomaniac and vicious killer. By December 1846, he had moved to Paris, and he told Forster in a letter dated 6 December of his plans to ‘slaughter’ Paul Dombey at the end of the fifth part of the novel (Letters, vol 4, 676). Despite the violence, it is an almost throwaway remark, but one which came back to haunt Dickens: in January 1847, from Paris, he wrote to Miss Burdett Coutts of the progress of Dombey and Son:

Between ourselves—Paul is dead. He died on Friday night about 10 o’Clock; and as I had no hope of getting to sleep afterwards, I went out, and walked about Paris until breakfast-time next morning. (Letters, vol 5, 9)

This is a vivid instance of Dickens’s aforementioned efforts to escape his spectres, a feat he found himself only able to accomplish in the labyrinthine streets of a large city. In these episodes, the boundary between the worlds of fact and fiction is elided—when his European travels did permit him to undertake long walks in its cities, Dickens found them to be places not of ‘lights and pleasure’, but of ‘guilt and darkness’, as one of his surrogate figures, Master Humphrey, remarks (Master Humphrey’s Clock, 124).

Dickens’s writing from his time in Europe, then, reveals something of his tumultuous relationship with cities, and their integral relationship with his authorial method. For Dickens, the city and mental life—even mental health—were inseparable, and its streets seemed to exercise over him as much a power of enervation as they did innervation.

Works Cited

Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. by P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 2010)

Dickens, Charles, Master Humphrey’s Clock (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907)

Dickens, Charles, The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, 12 vols, ed. by Graham Storey et al (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965–2002)

Dickens, Charles, Dickens’ Journalism, 4 vols, ed. by Michael Slater and John Drew (London: J. M. Dent, 1994–2002)

Hacking, Ian, Mad Travellers (London: Free Association Books, 1999)

Hollingshead, John, My Lifetime, 2 vols (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1895)