182 KNOWING DICKENS
partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can’t express how
much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which
it cannot bear, when busy, to lose.... My figures seem disposed to stagnate
without crowds about them” (4.612–13). The use of the word “figure” to
describe both human shapes seen in crowds and Dickens’s already invented
characters suggests an intimate interchange between external and internal
visualizations that Dickens recognizes as essential, but which he cannot name.
This interchange is connected with a desire for rapid motion, and a corre-
sponding fear of stagnation, of being unable to move.
Being unable to move forward in composition has its obverse side: being
unable to get away from his writing. Three weeks later Dickens repeated his
complaint with a different twist: “The absence of accessible streets continues
to worry me... at night I want them beyond description. I don’t seem to be
able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds” (4.622). “My
figures” have turned into “my spectres”: the possessor is again possessed.
Dickens’s anxiety about accessible streets suggests that streets are themselves
an important “figure” for him. They provide the half-lit glimpses which
acti vate the imagination, as well as the stage against which characters may be
seen as one sees, in relief, a figure who stands out against the crowd. At the
same time the night streets are a place of anonymous merging, where crowds
of other walkers can absorb, or reabsorb, the interior “spectres” that refuse
to dissipate of themselves. The physical action of walking anonymously in
a large city provides motion that might outrun the internal phantasmagoria,
while the city itself provides immersion in another element: the moving
visual entertainment of crowded streets. These 1846 letters get as close as
Dickens ever did to formulating the relationship between streets and nar-
ratives. To my mind they convey little evidence that ties Dickens’s writing
process directly to memories of walking to and from the blacking ware-
house. Rather, they suggest that the forward impetus of walking stimulated
invention as well as release from its attendant feelings, and that walking and
writing were metaphorically entwined with the tension between motion and
stasis, or creation and death.
Street Sound
In the 1841 edition of The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens had imagined the
difference between figuration and stasis in terms of a contrast between the
activity of seeing and the paralyzed passivity of hearing. The novel’s origi-
nal narrator, the deformed Master Humphrey, introduces himself with the