STREETS 183sentence “Night is generally my time of walking.” He explains: “it affords
me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of
those who fill the streets... a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of
a street lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full
revelation in the daylight.” For the strolling imaginist, night is “kinder” than
day, “which too often destroys an air-built castle at the moment of its com-
pletion, without the smallest ceremony or remorse.” After encountering Nell
in the street and leading her back to the curiosity shop, Humphrey speaks of
the “visible aids” which allow his imagination to be possessed by the figure
of Little Nell. The “heaps of fantastic things” in the shop “crowding upon
my mind,” allow Nell to be seen by the contrast that “brought her condition
palpably before me.” The figure of Nell emerges as a potential source of
narrative—she carries Humphrey’s mind along “at a great pace”—when she
is outlined against a contrasting crowd of people or objects (OCS 1).
The chapter is remarkable, however, for the meditation that follows on
the heels of Humphrey’s initial description of night walking. Suddenly he is
not seeing but imagining the mind of a listener confined indoors on a city
street. When the observer is deprived of the organizing power of vision, the
crowded city becomes an unstoppable torment. “The constant pacing to
and fro, that never-ending restlessness, that incessant tread of feet wearing
the rough stones smooth and glossy—is it not a wonder how the dwellers
in narrow ways can bear to hear it!” Humphrey muses. He imagines a sick
man forced against his will to listen to every footstep and identify the age
and class of the walker, his senses unable to screen out “the hum and noise”
or “the stream of life that will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his
restless dreams, as if he were condemned to lie dead but conscious, in a noisy
churchyard, and had no hope of rest for centuries to come.” Figured as an
auditory phenomenon, the city invades the conscious and the unconscious
mind just as Dickens’s specters invade his mind and rob him of sleep. Now
the restless city becomes a figure for the mind of the anxious dreamer rather
than an escape from it. And the awful paralysis of “dead but conscious”
suggests a nightmare of passive entrapment. Not altogether surprisingly, this
image is closely followed by a paragraph about crowds “forever passing and
re-passing on the bridges” with many a one pausing to look down and con-
sider suicide. If walking and seeing can make a narrative path through the
crowded streets, lying awake, hearing, and dreaming create obsessive internal
images that threaten stagnation and extinction.
Because the ear cannot shut out sound as the eye can shut out sight, Ste-
ven Connor observes, “the involuntary and continuous nature of hearing
exposes us to a world of sound the primary characteristic of which is its