178 KNOWING DICKENS
Dickens through Benjamin points to the historical typicality of Dickens’s
various street poses as walker, watcher, man of the crowd, detective, and
journalist. Yet Benjamin, who knew little of Dickens, does not hold the key
to Dickens’s street.
John Forster may not have held the key, either, but he can tell us about
his friend’s walking habits. Dickens was a man who had to walk, first and
foremost as a form of physical exercise; as Forster puts it, he “was always
passionately fond of walking.” Speaking of the early fifteen-mile horseback
rides he took with Dickens, Forster observes, “His notion of finding rest
from mental exertion in as much bodily exertion of equal severity, continued
with him to the last” (92). The experience of the young man can be glimpsed
in Nicholas Nickleby when the hero responds to his own anxiety by taking to
the streets. Worried about how to survive in London, Nicholas “resolved to
banish [his worries] from his thoughts by dint of hard walking.” But, though
he “mingled with the crowd,” trying to speculate about the people who pass
him, he is unable to banish his anxieties, “walk as fast as he would” (NN
16). Later, worried about his sister, he repeats the strategy, and “increased his
rate of walking as if in the hope of leaving his thoughts behind.” He fails
again; once in Hyde Park, “They crowded upon him more thickly... now
there were no passing objects to attract his attention” (NN 32). It’s a contest
between anxiety and rapid motion, between inner and outer crowdedness, in
which anxiety has the leading edge.
Having watched his friend push himself toward death in defiance of his
illnesses, Forster recalls that seven- or eight-mile walks were sufficient in the
early days, but that Dickens had later insisted on the “too great strain” of
walking fifteen miles or more, often at night (Forster 92). In fact Dickens
was boasting about doing fifteen- and twenty-mile night walks as early as
1843, during the composition of A Christmas Carol; in 1845, he reported
walking twenty miles a day during his holidays at Broadstairs (4.2; 4.358).
When Forster describes life at Gad’s Hill in the 1860s, he emphasizes the
ritual alternations of Dickens’s days: “Perhaps there was never a man who
changed places so much and habits so little. He was always methodical and
regular; and passed his life from day to day, divided for the most part between
working and walking, the same wherever he was” (Forster 656). Sticking to
his principle of emphasizing his friend’s discipline, Forster nevertheless man-
ages a neat juxtaposition of Dickens’s restless roaming and his need for a daily
schedule of work and exercise. Although Forster touches only reluctantly on
Dickens’s personal disappointments and endless financial responsibilities for
family members, it is grueling anger and anxiety, rather than problems of
invention or composition, that lie behind an outburst like the one to Forster