STREETS 189to ourself the gloomy and mournful scenes that are passing within” (Dent
1.237). Such moods are fleeting but important parts of the narrator’s per-
sona. As several critics have noted, Sketches by Boz repeatedly tells stories of
social decline over time, whether the subject is a family, a suit of clothes, a
hackney coach, or a shop. As a walker, Boz also defines himself through his
sympathy with what’s hidden behind the walls of the great city, whether they
are the literal walls of a prison or hospital, or the modest windows separating
some person’s anguish from the street. The movement inward is as powerful
as the movement downward; thus when we visit “Seven Dials” along with
Boz he can tell us not only about the maze of alleys and the disorderly (Irish)
street life, but also about who lives and works in the back and front kitchens
and attics of the dilapidated houses (Dent 1.70–75).
Rapt in his observations and speculations, Boz is occasionally startled to dis-
cover his own bodily presence. The narrator of “Meditations on Monmouth
Street” flees when he suddenly notices an old woman who has been peering
suspiciously at him during his prolonged fantasies on old clothes (Dent 1.82).
In “Doctors’ Commons” Boz becomes “so lost in these meditations, that we
had turned into the street, and run up against a door post, before we recol-
lected where we were walking” (Dent 1.92). Comical moments like these
puncture the pretensions of the flâneur, and admit to Boz’s own visibility in
the public arena where walking, looking, and speculation take place.
When Dickens invented the voice of the Uncommercial Traveller in
1860, he was aiming for an informal relationship with the readers of his
new magazine All the Year Round, and probably competing with Thackeray’s
“Roundabout Papers,” then appearing in the respected Cornhill Magazine.
The Traveller “for the great house of Human Interest Brothers” is more
likely than Boz to set out on his walks in search of particular out-of-the-way
interests, which range widely from piece to piece (Dent 4.28). As a walker,
the Uncommercial Traveller leaves behind the urban poses Boz liked to imi-
tate and parody; he is a highly idiosyncratic walker who knows the city no
one else knows. When he sets out for Wapping Workhouse from Covent
Garden, he names passing landmarks, which include places that appear in his
novels as well as actual London buildings. Losing his way in the East End,
he abandons himself to the narrow streets, and “relied on predestination to
bring me somehow or other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get there.”
When he stops to ask, he has instinctively arrived close to his predestined
destination (Dent 4.444).
In “Shy Neighborhoods” the narrator boasts about his long-distance
walking, and especially about a recent thirty-mile night walk into the coun-
try (presumably the October 1857 one to Gad’s Hill from London). He