STREETS 175Stephen Marcus vigorously contests Chesterton’s theory of unconscious
absorption, evoking a child who was already “exercising, in fact, his novelis-
tic gifts. Even in his darkest days of orphanage these gifts had never ceased
to serve and delight him; hurt as he was, he never stopped observing, never
fully withdrew, never walked through the streets of London without being
absorbed by what he saw and taking pleasure in his ability to see it.” But if
his powers of observation kept Dickens alive, as Marcus suggests, they did so
exactly because the orphanage had been so intense: “as his writing remained
his chief resource for understanding and controlling his early experience of
separation and estrangement, it also continued to develop as the theater for
re-enacting that experience, and he returned to those streets, it seems, to seek
and recover that part of himself which had almost literally to be re-lived in
order for him to write—indeed for him to live.” Although Marcus celebrates
the wide-awake talent that allowed the child to survive, he ends up with
another kind of romantic mythology: Dickens had to re-walk those streets
at night in order to write, in order to live; his writing “was mysteriously and
irrevocably connected with that epoch in his life when he was literally a
solitary wanderer in the city” (Marcus 279–81).
“Literally?”—the rest of his walking life was metaphorical, an attempt to
recapture an awful but singular reality? The subject of Dickens’s walking has
a tendency to elicit a certain kind of melodrama in those who try to under-
stand it primarily as an effect of the child’s experience of the blacking days.
The tone is audible again in Ned Lukacher’s pages on Dickens: “Coerced as a
child into an anxiety-producing cycle of over-production, Dickens the adult,
once again compelled to please the crowd, once again returns to the streets
that he has always identified with such feelings of crisis. He is certain of
only two things: that he must write and that he must walk.... He was indeed
caught in a vicious circle, consumed by the obsessive patterns that indissolu-
bly joined his nightwalks and his artistic production” (Lukacher 293–94).
What’s interesting about such interpretations is the urgency with which
Dickens’s walking and writing are joined and identified with an “original”
kind of walking that is situated in the suffering twelve-year-old worker.
As I have already suggested, Dickens’s London was co-extensive with the
region of his childhood experience, and he regularly represented fear and
vulnerability in characters that are lost or threatened in city streets. When he
wrote about himself, however, walking was a sign of independent compe-
tence and health. As I will argue later in this chapter, walking was less a way
back to his early terror and isolation than a means of escape from his fear
of reentering such a state. Even the careful accounts of the child’s walking
routes in the autobiographical fragment add to its verisimilitude and attest