STREETS 181walk about the fields and streets every evening... otherwise I should not be
steadily enough set upon the dismissal of two of the greatest favorites [Tom
and Ruth Pinch] I have ever had” (4.145). Paul Dombey “died on Friday
night about 10 o’Clock; and as I had no hope of getting to sleep afterwards,
I went out, and walked about Paris until breakfast-time next morning” (5.9).
As he worked on Little Dorrit in Paris: “my head really stings with the visions
of the book, and I am going, as we French say, to disembarrass it by plung-
ing into some of the strange places I glide into of nights in these latitudes”
(8.40). Forster writes that Dickens needed “an equal severity” of mental
and physical exertion; he also seems to have needed a balance or interchange
between the internal stimulation of his imaginative labor and the external
stimulation of the streets.
Dickens came to understand his need for night streets as “quite a little
mental phenomenon” during the mid-’40s, when his writing slowed down
and left him restlessly moving between London and the Continent (4.622).
As he geared up to write The Chimes in Genoa in the fall of 1844, he com-
plained to Forster: “I want a crowded street to plunge into at night” (4.200).
But that was only one side of the picture. A few weeks later, The Chimes
complete, Dickens wrote to Thomas Mitton: “I have worn myself to Death,
in the Month I have been at Work. None of my usual reliefs have been at
hand; I have not been able to divest myself of the story—have suffered very
much in my sleep, in consequence—and am so shaken by such work in this
trying climate that I am nervous as a man who is dying of Drink: and as
haggard as a Murderer” (4.211). The story he works so hard to master dur-
ing the day’s writing possesses him at night. Dickens’s images of insomniac
self-destruction—he’s a drunkard or a murderer—are characteristic of his
outbursts to friends, but they suggest that the imagined actions and reactions
of the writing process left him subject to disturbing arousals of violent and
guilty feeling. He felt something like a murderer whenever he completed a
story or killed off a character that had been brought to life with such internal
intensity.
The best-known letters about writing and city streets come from 1846,
during Dickens’s residence in Lausanne. When he arrived there he recog-
nized that he might “want streets sometimes,” and he imagined that Geneva,
twenty-four miles away, might suit the purpose (4.560). The Lausanne streets
were steep and uninteresting, but the country provided plenty of walking
along the lake, in the hills, and along “excellent country roads,” he told
Forster (4.568). As he wrote the first numbers of Dombey and Son, he reported
himself full of invention, “but the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid
pace, is prodigious.... I suppose this is partly the effect of two years’ ease, and