This post has been contributed by Dr. Trish Bredar, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on representations of physical mobility in British literature of the long nineteenth century, with particular interests in gender, walking, the everyday, and the relationship between mobility and liberty. You can find her on Twitter at @trishbredar.

Few authors can rival Charles Dickens in their ability to bring to life the rich, chaotic human tapestry of the Victorian streets. His work seems to take in the full, interconnected sweep of society, from its upper echelons to its crossing sweepers and pickpockets. Dickens’s vividly rendered portraits of the Victorian underclass are particularly valuable, preserving (albeit in highly mediated form) the stories of people who rarely left behind written records of their own. Dickens was not alone in wanting to shine light on the darkest corners of his society, particularly when it came to representing London. In the mid-nineteenth century, all sorts of reform-minded people—city planners, charity boards, investigative journalists—were busy trying to write the sprawling metropolis into something that could be understood, analyzed, and improved.

“Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward,” after 1908. Photo © Tate. Image released under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported). https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fildes-applicants-for-admission-to-a-casual-ward-t01227

Yet even as a celebrated author of the streets, Dickens frequently struggled to put into words his encounters with the most destitute Londoners, the unhoused poor who made the streets their home. In his 1856 essay, “A Nightly Scene in London,” first published in Household Words, Dickens describes coming upon a group of unsheltered people in Whitechapel:

Crouched against the wall of the Workhouse, in the dark street, on the muddy pavement-stones, with the rain raining upon them, were five bundles of rags. They were motionless, and had no resemblance to the human form. Five great bee-hives, covered with rags—five dead bodies taken out of graves, tied neck-and-heels, and covered with rags—would have looked like these five bundles upon which the rain rained down in the public street. (25) [1]

It is hard to imagine a bleaker scene than the one that emerges in Dickens’s attempt to describe these five people. I say “attempt” because he seems to falter repeatedly in his search for words. Seeking an appropriate metaphor—“bundles”? “beehives”? He finally lands on one, “dead bodies,” that strays too close to the literal. After all, what hope is there for these poor souls, huddled in the freezing rain, denied even the shelter of the casual ward? As Dickens searches for humanity amongst the “bundles,” he engages one of them, a young woman, in conversation, but finds her sadly blank, with “no curiosity or interest left” (26). She mutely receives his gift of a shilling: “She never thanked me, never looked at me—melted away into the miserable night, in the strangest manner I ever saw. I have seen many strange things, but not one that has left a deeper impression on my memory than the dull impassive way in which that worn-out heap of misery took that piece of money, and was lost” (26).

What particularly interests me about this scene is the way the unnamed woman refuses Dickens’s (and the reader’s) desire to know her, to witness her gratitude, or perhaps hear her tale of woe. This impassiveness becomes so powerful that she leaves “a deeper impression on [Dickens’s] memory” than anything he has ever seen (26)— a significant claim coming from a professional chronicler of life’s oddities.

Uncaptioned scene from “Wapping Work-House,” Charles S. Reinhard, 1876. Victorian Web. https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/reinhart/ut18.html Originally published in The Uncommercial Traveller, American Household Edition.

Once we start looking, we see similar episodes elsewhere in Dickens’s work. In the Uncommercial Traveller essay, “Night Walks,” the quasi-autobiographical narrator documents his “education in a fair amateur experience of houselessness” as he wanders the London streets (348).[2] Yet this education fails to prepare him for the strange encounter that follows:

I came to the great steps of St. Martin’s church as the clock was striking Three. Suddenly, a thing that in a moment more I should have trodden upon without seeing, rose up at my feet with a cry of loneliness and houselessness…the like of which I never heard. We then stood face to face looking at one another…. The creature was like a beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty, and it had a loose bundle of rags on…. It shivered from head to foot, and its teeth chattered, and as it stared at me—persecutor, devil, ghost, whatever it thought me—it made with its whining mouth as if it were snapping at me, like a worried dog. Intending to give this ugly object money, I put out my hand to stay it…and laid my hand upon its shoulder. Instantly, it twisted out of its garment…and left me standing alone with its rags in my hands. (351)

“Little Dorrit’s Party,” Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), 1856. Illustration for Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Part IV (Book 1, Chapter 14). Image from Authentic Edition, 1901, facing p. 150. Image scan and text by Philip V. Allingham. https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/176.html

As in “A Nightly Scene,” Dickens again struggles to describe this person, or even to name them as human—“it” is a “thing,” an “object,” a “creature” like a “youth of twenty,” but not quite. Again, the experience is unprecedented, with its “cry…the like of which I never heard” (351). And, again, the person reveals nothing of themself but rather melts into the night, leaving the narrator with only a deep sense of unease and a handful of rags.

Echoes of these encounters also make their way into Dickens’s fiction. In a memorable chapter of Little Dorrit that presages the nocturnal wanderings of “Night Walks,” Amy Dorrit and her friend Maggy find themselves temporarily houseless when they are locked out of the Marshalsea prison. Forced to wander until daylight, the two move safely through the streets by passing as a mother and child. They are stopped only once, by a young woman, presumably a sex worker, who is concerned for Little Dorrit’s safety. Shocked to find that Amy is in fact a grown woman, she recoils: “‘I never should have touched you, but I thought that you were a child.’ And with a strange, wild cry, she went away” (191).[3] We can again see parallels between this scene and Dickens’s first-hand encounters with the woman who “melts away” in “A Nightly Scene” or the youth who utters a “cry of loneliness and houselessness” in the Uncommercial Traveler.

Together, these passages highlight Dickens’s persistent desire to document the extremities of unsheltered life. Yet they also show him struggling to connect with, describe fully, or even name as human some of the people he encountered on the London streets. While we might rightly find this last point troubling, there is also something to be admired in how Dickens acknowledges his inability to fully understand the homeless experience. In an era when literary depictions of poverty were often packaged into neat moral lessons, the decision to let these figures melt into the night without satisfying our desire for resolution is powerful in itself. Baffled though he may be by these encounters, Dickens does not gloss over them but rather embraces their uncanny quality, allowing them to haunt his writings and leave their deep impression on the reader’s mind.