190 KNOWING DICKENS
claims that his “regular four miles an hour” pace put him to sleep, and that
he covered the distance in that favorite Dickens state between sleeping and
waking, while his mind went on journeys into verse and a foreign language
grown rusty in his conscious life. Walking is intertwined with the uncon-
scious, as it is in his distinction between two kinds of walking: “one, straight
on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely
vagabond.” The first kind suggests the disciplined striver; the second, vagrant
instinct and heredity: it “is so natural to me and strong with me, that I think
I must be the descendant at no great distance of some irreclaimable tramp”
(Dent 4.119). Semi-autobiographical as they are, such self-descriptions serve
the rhetorical purpose of creating a narrator who goes to inner and outer
landscapes strange to his readers. His special experience makes it possible for
him to write in “Shy Neighborhoods” about the individual peculiarities
of animals that inhabit obscure London squares, or to make an apparently
complete taxonomy of every species of tramp to be encountered on “all the
summer roads in all directions” (“Tramps,” Dent 4.127).
Although he was capable of stunning scenes describing street crowds in
action, Dickens’s most powerful urban journalism was generated from tem-
porarily empty or abandoned streets in which isolated figures make dra-
matic appearances. “The Streets-Morning,” the most effective urban piece
in Sketches by Boz, begins at the hour before sunrise, after the last drunk of
the night has staggered past but before the stirring of morning life. The
narrator, one of the few awake, is impressed by the “air of cold, solitary
desolation about the noiseless streets.” As in Wordsworth’s “Composed upon
Westminster Bridge,” the absence of crowds and bustle casts “the stillness of
death... over the streets,” but unlike Wordsworth, Boz wants only to bring
London back to life. Searching for any sign of activity, his eye discovers an
“occasional policeman... listlessly gazing on the deserted prospect before
him,” as well as a “rakish-looking cat” sneaking home after a long night on
the town (Dent 1.49–51). (The same policeman and “guilty-looking cat”
will show up during Mr. Verloc’s early-morning walk across London in
Conrad’s The Secret Agent.) An hour goes by, and a market-cart appears, lit-
tle tables for street breakfasts are put out, the little chimney sweep sits on
a stoop to wait for the housemaid to get up and answer his knock. The
details gradually populate the city with figures normally invisible to the doz-
ing middle-class eye; soon the narrator is observing a little flirtation among
three servants who emerge at the same time to take in the household milk
or take down the master’s shutters. By eleven o’clock the preparations for
the day are complete; the stage is set for commerce. By noon, “the streets are
thronged with a vast concourse of people, gay and shabby, rich and poor, idle