184 KNOWING DICKENS
impermanence. The world of sight appears to be there; pressing on us without
remission, the world of sound is only ever there at the moment of our hearing
it. The world of pure hearing would therefore be, so to speak, unremittingly
intermittent” (Connor 2000, 17). Following from this distinction, sight would
anchor a feeling of external stability, while sound without sight has the poten-
tial to dissolve the apparent public continuum of time and space. In Dickens’s
writing, the sounds of footsteps and bells evoke private or secret associations
that threaten to derail the forward momentum of both public and private his-
tories. The involuntary aspect of sound is regularly associated with disrupted
walking, and with a loss of orientation in time and space.
Elaborated versions of the figure occur in Bleak House and in A Tale of Two
Cities, in each case associated with a revolution that violently alters the course
of history. “The Ghost’s Walk” of Chesney Wold becomes audible as rain
falls on the terrace and Watt Rouncewell hears “a curious echo—I suppose
an echo—which is very like a halting step.” The deformed step belonged to
a previous Lady Dedlock who defied the family and the legitimate rule of
King Charles I by her secret support of the rebels during the English Revo-
lution. When the sound comes, Mrs. Rouncewell says, “it must be heard. My
Lady, who is afraid of nothing, admits that when it is there, it must be heard.
You cannot shut it out” (BH 7). The bravura poses of My Lady can be threat-
ened, it seems, by the insistence of that gentle echo. The Darnays’ London
residence in A Tale of Two Cities sits on a street corner described as “a curious
corner in its acoustical properties, such a peculiar Ear of a place” (T TC 2.6)
that the echoes of local footsteps create a confused auditory experience, in
which the listener cannot judge the distance of actual footsteps coming or
going, or link the sound with visual evidence. Those who wait and watch
in the house are unable to tell whether footsteps signal an approach until
the walker comes into view. The echoing threat foretells the coming of the
Terror in France, which will profoundly disrupt the apparent stability of the
household. Both passages link distortions of sound with distortions of walk-
ing, and signal the characters’ vulnerability to uncontrollable or violent forces
in the social order and the individual psyche.
Apart from the bells that announced the arrival of the New Year and the
bells that jingled on his Gad’s Hill sleigh, bells—or, more often, Bells—also
evoke such threats in Dickens’s imaginary. Like many Victorian profession-
als, Dickens could be deeply irritated by street noise and street musicians, but
bells, whose sound is most often “clashing,” retained a special charge. From
Boulogne in 1854 he tells Elizabeth Gaskell about “the baptizing of some
new bells, lately hung up (to my sorrow and lunacy)”; on a Sunday in 1855
he complains, “Five hundred thousand pairs of pattens are now going to