174 KNOWING DICKENS
as an articulation of city space: footsteps crossing and mingling “give their
shape to spaces. They weave places together.” He asks us to think of city
streets as a system analogous to the system of language: particular walks taken
or sentences uttered will activate certain potentials of the system and not
others (de Certeau 97–98).
Although it is not difficult to find Dickens playing rhetorical variations
on already recognizable images of isolation in crowds or labyrinthine mazes,
such tropes are hardly central to his most engaged imagination of the metro-
polis. So I find de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” suggestive about Dick-
ens in special ways. He—and his characters—are extraordinary examples of
the walkers de Certeau calls “the ordinary practitioners of the city” who
“live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins,” and cre-
ate the city through “the act itself of passing by” (de Certeau 93, 97). For
all its recognizable public landmarks—Smithfield Market, the dome of St.
Paul’s, the walls of Newgate, Waterloo Bridge—Dickens’s London is readily
imaginable as a series of footsteps marking private, sometimes intersecting,
paths through the streets. The analogy between walking and language is also
suggestive: it has always been tempting to identify Dickens’s walking with
Dickens’s writing, although it is difficult to stabilize the relation between
the two. Before turning to Dickens’s own writing about walking, I want to
sketch out two lines of speculation that have become prominent in the criti-
cal conversation about Dickens the walker.
G. K. Chesterton initiated the romantic psycho-biographical approach
in his 1906 study of Dickens. Borrowing a phrase from The Pickwick Papers,
in which being locked out of lodgings for the night is ironically described
as holding “the key of the street,” Chesterton turns it to his own purpose:
“Dickens himself had, in the most sacred and serious sense of the term, the
key of the street.” Chesterton turns the phrase around so that the streets
themselves become a “great house locked up” that few can enter until Dick-
ens enlightens them. “He could open the inmost door of his house—the
door that leads into that secret passage which is lined with houses and roofed
with stars.” The interior landscape evoked by that image is not accidental;
Chesterton goes on to imagine Dickens’s days of “drifting” through the
streets during his childhood employment, as if they had produced not an
observant little walker but a dreamily unconscious absorber of the places that
formed backgrounds to his silent woe. “For him ever afterwards these streets
were mortally romantic; they were dipped in the purple dyes of youth and
its tragedy, and rich with irrevocable sunsets. Herein is the whole secret of
that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull
corner of London” (Chesterton 34–36).