180 KNOWING DICKENS
describe himself as “breaking out,” as though he had been imprisoned or
enchained by his own practice of publishing in serial installments.
By 1850 he could boast that he was working at Copperfield “like a steam
engine” (6.64), and he sounded more assured about the necessity for keep-
ing his working and walking hours free from distraction: “at this time of
the Month, I must get air and exercise in the evening—and think.... This is
really the sort of condition on which I hold my inventive powers; and I can’t
get rid of it” (6.98–99). Excusing himself from a social invitation, he wrote
to Miss Coutts as he was working on Bleak House that he was anxious to get
the month’s number done, “And if I let myself out of my room under such
circumstances, I have lost my power over myself for the day” (6.688). By
1857, as his personal unhappiness mounted, he was referring to his restless-
ness as “the penalty of an imaginative life and constitution” or “the wayward
and unsettled feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one
holds an imaginative life” (8.422; 8.434). His talent, as he experiences it, is a
“tenure” that required both rigorous harnessing and daily bouts of physical
release. He is required to hold it, but it comes with conditions and penalties
that exempt him from ordinary social behaviors.
Walking was essential both to bring his books into being, and to calm the
effects of his intense engagement with his characters. Repeatedly his letters
mention extended periods of walking as he is working toward a new proj-
ect. The activity of walking allowed him to think his way into new fictional
worlds, while allaying the increased restlessness that came upon him when he
was still in a state of uncertainty. As Dickens joked about this state to Miss
Coutts, he evoked the emotional violence that accompanied the process: as
he is “in the agonies of plotting and contriving a new book... I am accus-
tomed to walk up and down the house, smiting my forehead dejectedly; and
to be so horribly cross and surly, that the boldest fly at my approach.” At
such times, he claims, his publishers never visit him alone “lest I should fall
upon a single invader and do murder on his intrusive body” (3.367). In the
earliest stages of Dombey, “Vague thoughts of a new book are rife within me
just now; and I go wandering about at night into the strangest places, accord-
ing to my usual propensity at such a time—seeking rest, and finding none”
(4.510). Half-comic images of murder show up frequently to describe both
the ends of numbers and the deaths of characters: Dickens begs off a dinner
“until my February work has had its throat cut: which laudable deed I shall
perform with all convenient dispatch” (3.437); the death of Little Nell is a
“Nellicide” (2.228).
Violent or not, endings required walking. As he was completing Martin
Chuzzlewit, he begged off from Lady Holland because “I am obliged to