188 KNOWING DICKENS
a particular turning. He makes sure, however, to distinguish himself from
other strollers who walk only to display themselves. Opening one of his
earliest street sketches, “Shops and Their Tenants,” Boz exclaims in classic
flâneur fashion, “What inexhaustible food for speculation, do the streets of
London afford!” In the next sentences he is busy telling us what he is not: a
member of the well-dressed “race” of idle swells who lounge on the “lead-
ing thoroughfares” of the West End. “These men linger listlessly past, look-
ing as happy and animated as a policeman on duty. Nothing seems to make
an impression on their minds,” Boz complains (Dent 1.61). Another early
piece, “Thoughts about People,” sets the narrator’s observations of middle-
class city “types” against “precocious puppyism in the Quadrant, whiskered
dandyism in Regent-street and Pall-mall, or gallantry in its dotage anywhere”
(Dent 1.215). Boz, however, is acquainted with the most ordinary, down-at-
heels neighborhoods, and—long-term watcher as he is—can tell us about the
gradual social decline of a certain house-turned-shop or the lonely day of a
single London clerk.
In “Our Next-Door Neighbor,” Boz sounds another classic line: “We are
very fond of speculating as we walk through a street, on the character and
pursuits of the people who inhabit it.” He proceeds to do so, not by reading
“the human countenance,” but by attending to “the physiognomy of street
door knockers” (Dent 1.41). His delightful parody of the face-reading flâneur
stops short of suggesting that a change in a man’s disposition would affect
the appearance of his knocker, but he is certain that in such a case the man
would feel compelled to remove the old knocker and seek another “more
congenial to his altered feelings” (Dent 1.43). The story then shifts into an
account of the lodgers next door, ending with a tubercular young man from
the country who dies in his mother’s arms, begging to be buried outside the
city, “not in these close crowded streets; they have killed me” (Dent 1.47).
The odd eruption of the romantic city-country division splits the dying son,
copyist, and translator from the thriving Boz, who has made London the stuff
of a self-sufficient writing career.
High-jinks about door knockers are characteristic of the movement of
Boz’s mind from small signs to imagined human situations. In “Streets-
Morning,” he reads open windows as signs of a hot, restless sleeper within;
the flicker “of the rushlight through the window blind denotes the chamber
of watching or sickness” (Dent 1.51). At times he can be counted on to wax
exhortatory: “How few of those who pass such a miserable creature as this,
think of the anguish of heart, the sinking of soul and spirit, which the very
effort of singing produces” (Dent 1.58). Sometimes his evening rambles lead
him to “pause beneath the windows of some public hospital, and picture