STREETS 173within an easy walk of their source of pain at Lincoln’s Inn, Dickens’s London
keeps his history close at hand. Perhaps more important, his history underlies
the sense of mastery crucial to his creation of London as a known and yet
secret landscape of particular streets, houses, churches, and shops.
Critical accounts of Dickens’s London have been roughly divided between
a London seen from above as a coherent system and a London created through
a dispersed series of particular localities. I tend toward the latter view: views
of roofs and chimneys from above street level—like the dismaying view
from the room where Oliver Twist is imprisoned by Fagin—are associated
with confusion, indistinctness, isolation, and the arrest of motion. The land-
scape of roofs, chimneys, and masts that Arthur Clennam sees from the Iron
Bridge is less a widening of vision than a jumbled “wilderness” (LD 1.9).
Certain rather atypical set pieces like the opening of Bleak House, the view
from Todgers’s in Martin Chuzzlewit, and the Asmodeus passage in Dombey
and Son (“Oh, for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off ”) have
accumulated so much commentary over the years that they seem to stand for
Dickens as an omniscient city observer. In my view such moments register
most of all the impossibility of achieving a panoramic or comprehensive
view of the metropolis. Perhaps they have received more than their share of
critical attention exactly because of their obtrusiveness in narratives whose
business as usual takes us on walks through city streets.
How can a great metropolis be apprehended or represented? Raymond
Williams finds Dickens’s vision of urban modernity neither in “topography”
nor in “local instance,” but “in the form of his novels... It does not matter
which way we put it: the experience of the city is the fictional method; or
the fictional method is the experience of the city.” He refers to Dickens’s
way of presenting characters as if they were isolated entities observed in the
streets, members of a crowd rushing past one another. As the novels proceed,
relationships and commitments are “forced into consciousness,” thus provid-
ing an underlying grid of connection beneath “the sheer rush and noise
and miscellaneity of this new and complex social order” (Williams 154–55).
The image evoked here is a literary convention already known to the young
Dickens: the city-as-crowd. As Richard Maxwell suggests in The Mysteries of
Paris and London, the great metropolis is unknowable and must be allegorized
though certain figures; his own touchstones of modernity are the labyrinth,
the crowd, the panorama, and paperwork, hidden or passing from hand to
hand. Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” also approaches the
great metropolis as a figure of the unknowable, though it takes a more impro-
visatory approach. Dismissing the illusion of omniscience offered by the
panoramic view from above, de Certeau meditates on the act of walking