STREETS 187comfortable recollections and what not, to all sorts of people and places... the
bells haunting people in the night... according to their deeds” (4.203–4).
Only the last phrases carry the deeper effect of the actual story.
Dickens once recommended an appropriate occasion for the simultane-
ous tolling of city church bells. A letter to The Times of 17 November 1849
lays out a long explanation of his opposition to public hanging, and suggests
that executions take place within the walls of the prison, with no publicity
for the condemned except this: “during the hour of the body’s hanging I
would have the bells of all the churches in that town or city tolled, and all the
shops shut up, that all might be reminded of what was being done” (5.653).
The sound, he thought, would awaken internal reflection, while the visual
spectacle of a crowd at a hanging created only sensation. Assigned to a prac-
tice Dickens deplores, the bells announce the presence of social murder, while
the city is obliged to stop its buying and selling and listen in guilty horror.
“Streams” of urban crowds flowing toward their final destinies, along with
the inchoate “roar” of urban street noise, show up regularly in the novels,
adopted from the standard repertoire of early nineteenth-century figures of
the city-as-crowd. Compared with the distinct sounds of bells or footsteps,
such passages display a kind of emotional neutrality. The already well-worn
notion of isolation amid the crowd left Dickens cold as well; his street nar-
ratives move quickly from the blur of indistinct noisy motion to the inter-
ested discriminations of the framing eye. As he wrote to W. H. Wills from
a northern reading tour, “I walked from Durham to Sunderland, and made
a little fanciful photograph in my mind of Pit-Country.... I couldn’t help
looking upon my mind as I was doing it, as a sort of capitally prepared and
highly sensitive plate. And I said, without the least conceit (as Watkins might
have said of a plate of his) ‘it really is a pleasure to work with you, you receive
the impression so nicely’ ” (8.669). By 1858, he had earned the pleasure of
that comparison.
Street Sketches
When Dickens set out to write in the genre of the street sketch, his self-
representations as a city walker were literary poses quite different from his
self-portraits in letters. The “we” of the unknown Boz and the well-known
“I” of the Uncommercial Traveller are said to lounge, loiter, saunter, or ram-
ble in flâneur-like fashion as they go about their speculations on the streets.
Boz may be “struck” by certain figures as they pass by, or his attention may be
attracted by a scene or a crowd of curious observers that draws him toward