176 KNOWING DICKENS
to Dickens’s ongoing interest in particular streets and bridges; there is more
pride than pathos in those memories. Moreover, Dickens had been drawn
to the seamy neighborhoods of London even during his pre-blacking days.
Forster corroborates the attraction when he says of Dickens’s first two years
in the family house in Camden Town: “If he could only induce whomsoever
took him out to take him through Seven-dials, he was supremely happy”
(Forster 11).
Forster may have derived at least part of his impression from “Gone
Astray” (1853), a memory-piece Dickens published in Household Words. In
this nostalgic essay, the narrator recalls himself as a very young child who
becomes separated from his adult companion and spends the day quite hap-
pily walking and fantasizing in the City. On the remembered morning, the
child and his companion set out for St. Giles Church; the child supposedly
nurtures fantasies of beggars who, on Sundays, set aside their pretenses and
go to church. From there they proceed to Northumberland House on the
Strand “to view the celebrated lion over the gateway.” There they are sepa-
rated, and Dickens writes in his time-traveling way, “The child’s unreason-
ing terror of being lost, comes as freshly on me now, as it did then” (Dent
3.156–57). It doesn’t last long; soon the child is making plans to entertain
himself for the day. He asks his way to the Guildhall (a substantial walk away)
so he can gaze at the Giants Gog and Magog; he buys himself lunch, which
is snatched from him by a friendly but self-interested dog; he wanders about
the City, idealizing the grandness of its institutions; he strays into the East
End and takes himself to a working-class pantomime. Only then, in the rainy
dark, does he miss home and think to find a watch-house from which his
father can be notified to fetch him.
The memory—if it is one—mixes the pleasure of walking, gazing, and
making up stories with the apprehensions of a child afraid of being noticed
by others, who pretends that there is nothing unusual about his being alone
in the streets. Its blend of innocent romanticism and self-conscious play-
acting captures the aura that suffuses David Copperfield, as well as the jour-
nalistic reminiscences that followed after it. The piece as a whole defies the
vulnerabilities of the autobiographical fragment, in a way suitable for light
entertainment in Household Words. The ending, however, registers guilt. “By
daylight, I had never thought of the grief at home. I had never thought of
my mother. I had never thought of anything but adapting myself to the cir-
cumstances in which I found myself, and going to seek my fortune” (Dent
3.165). Independent city walking is a flight into fantasy that forgets domestic
connections. Those sentences might be read as an internal reversal: the child
walker abandons and forgets the parents rather than the other way around.