STREETS 179of September 1854: “If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode
and perish” (7.429). Dickens walked to write; he also walked to let off steam
from the frustrations of family life.
On those rapid walks, in town or in the country, Dickens counted the
miles and watched his pace as athletes do; nor could he resist climbing an
interesting mountain if he was traveling in its vicinity. In these ways he has
more in common with his fellow Victorian long-distance walkers than with
any incarnation of the flâneur. He liked company on his walks, especially if
his companion could keep up with his normal pace. Writing to John Leech
from his holiday in Folkestone in 1855, he complained about his sister and
brother-in-law the Austins “as taking crawls rather than walks”; Georgina
Hogarth, on the other hand, was a frequent companion who was willing to
splash cheerfully through the Paris mud with him (7.700; 8.15). His explora-
tions of London’s byways were sometimes nights on the town with a friend
like Daniel Maclise or Wilkie Collins, sometimes expeditions in search of
specific material, and sometimes the night roamings of an anxiety-ridden
insomniac.
Walking to Write
Dickens counted pages as well as miles. His sense of the intimate relation
between walking and writing can best be glimpsed through his correspon-
dence, which attests to a strenuous interplay between the two. Throughout
his life, he wrote letters excusing himself from social visits because of the
pressure of work and the necessity of walking. Consistently, he represented
himself as a kind of emotional machine that required careful handling. As
he was courting Catherine Hogarth he instructed her about the peculiarity
of his composition style: “I never can write with effect—especially in the
serious way—until I have got my steam up, or in other words until I have
become so excited with my subject that I cannot leave off ” (1.97). “Spirits
are not to be forced up to the Pickwick point, every day,” he pointed out
to his publishers when his monthly installments were running late (1.189).
Discipline came hard in the early years, when he caged himself in with mul-
tiple deadlines. After going out with Forster “I couldn’t write a line ’till three
oClock, and have yet 5 slips to finish, and don’t know what to put in them for
I have reached the point I meant to leave off with” (1.395–96). Still working
on Nickleby, he confesses that he had written much of the night, but had left
four slips, “and as I foolishly left them ’till this morning have the steam to
get up afresh” (1.425). After finishing a number, Dickens would sometimes