STREETS 171will take you through brick-fields and tile-yards to her dingy back room,
perhaps in Shoreditch, where she will strip you of your expensive clothes, put
you in rags, and escort you through “a labyrinth of narrow streets and lanes”
to “the roar of a great thoroughfare.” If you are a lost young girl dressed like
a beggar child, it will take you two hours of asking your way to the City
until you find yourself at a wharf near London Bridge where you will finally
be rescued (DS 6).
Everyone knows that Dickens rewrote and permanently transformed the
literary image of London; he is rightly recognized as the first great urban
novelist in English. But how did he do it? Street by street, house by house,
walker by walker. The description of getting to a place is an essential part of
the place itself; Dickens is not a novelist who picks up his audience and sets
us down in a new scene as if travel and distance shrink to nothing in the art
of fiction. As he advised an aspiring novelist in 1866, “Suppose yourself tell-
ing that affecting incident in a letter to a friend. Wouldn’t you describe how
you went through the life and stir of the streets and roads, to the sick-room?
Wouldn’t you say what kind of room it was, what time of day it was, whether
it was sunlight, starlight, or moonlight?” (11.161). For Dickens, nothing
could be more obvious or necessary to an effective story. Of course we can-
not quite pinpoint all those houses or shops he walks us to; there is always
a little gap between the description of the route and the imagined place of
arrival. Real or imaginary, however, the city is seen from the point of view
of a person in the street, most often coming or going by foot.
Dickens’s transformation of the urban writing that had grown up with
him during the Regency period depends on that walker and those streets.
London is realized neither through panoramic views nor by urban spectator-
ship in the rebuilt West End avenues, squares, and parks sponsored by George
IV during the 1820s. Instead it is a dense but known network of streets and
turnings that are ways to get from here to there, or an intricate maze of little
alleys in which the poor and the hunted can escape from view. Someone is
always in possession of knowledge about those networks and mazes. It might
be the “bad un’s” like Sikes or Good Mrs. Brown or George Radfoot lead-
ing their victims on winding routes they cannot later recall. It might be the
good ones like Amy Dorrit or Kate Nickleby, treading their paths from home
to work with faithful regularity. It might be the followers like Nadgett or
Bucket or Arthur Clennam in detective mode, contriving to hide in plain
sight as urban pedestrians while they gather information about the comings
and goings of their suspects. Shadowing every fictional walker is the narrator,
whose knowledge of London streets had been on public display ever since
the twenty-two-year-old Dickens began publishing his “Street Sketches” in