STREETS 177Or, they might signify for the adult writer, whose fascination with the city
takes him, every day, miles away from home.
Looking at Dickens’s multiply inflected writing can help to loosen, if
not to break, any absolute bonds that biographical speculation may forge
between blacking, walking, and writing. A more recent line of criticism alters
the emphasis: it has become common to identify Dickens with the figure
of the flâneur. This has the advantage of placing Dickens in a more literary
way, within a tradition of urban walking and writing featuring the detached
but curious spectatorship of the city stroller. To compare Sketches by Boz, as
Deborah Nord does, with earlier urban sketches by Pierce Egan, Charles
Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, or Leigh Hunt is to appreciate the originality
of Dickens’s middle- and lower-middle-class terrain, the familiarity of a city
that is inhabited, not just observed, by its narrator, and the way Boz gives
places and people a depth of life over time (Nord 30–64). Such comparisons
tend to move Dickens further from the conventional image of the flâneur,
although the label tends to return whenever a critic finds Dickens at a classed,
gendered, or unsympathetic distance from his subjects. Michael Hollington,
who has done the most detailed work of attaching Dickens to the concept of
the flâneur, also opens productive questions about Dickens’s literary relations
with Paris and its writers. It’s important, however, to distinguish between
Dickens’s invocations of the urban stroller in the self-descriptions of Boz or
The Uncommercial Traveller, and his personal mythologies of walking.
The flâneur theory has the disadvantage of coming at Dickens through
a series of other figures as they are sifted through the fragmentary medita-
tions of Walter Benjamin. In Benjamin, flânerie is a deeply ironized, deeply
compromised series of poses that are always in the process of historical trans-
formation. At times the flâneur seems to be a figure with which Benjamin
identifies, especially when he imagines the city’s history in the paving stones
pressing against the soles of the walker’s feet, or when he writes about Baude-
laire’s capacity for empathy with the crowd in which he feels his solitude. For
the most part, however, Benjamin points to the various incarnations of flânerie
as consolatory delusions that make urban modernity bearable, or as forms
of self-commodification disguised as alienation from the marketplace. “The
man of letters,” he writes, “goes to the marketplace as a flâneur, supposedly to
take a look at it, but in reality to find a buyer” (Benjamin 1973, 34). At other
moments the flâneur morphs into the detective, the man of the crowd, the
shopper, the journalist, even—“the last incarnation”—the sandwich-board
man (1999, M 19.2). For the conventional image of the flâneur as a removed
urban spectator who thinks he can read people’s stories or characters through
glimpses of faces on the street, Benjamin has nothing but contempt. Reading