STREETS 191and industrious” (Dent 1.54). The predictable urban contrasts shut down the
essay, as if to emphasize the freshness of Boz’s invention during the backstage
hours of the morning.
When he walks in London, the Uncommercial Traveller makes a point of
seeking out nearly deserted spots, where each human encounter acquires a
special charge. In “City of London Churches” (1860) and “The City of the
Absent” (1863), he pays Sunday visits to the virtually abandoned churches and
ancient graveyards of the old City of London. The churchyards, “so small,
so rank, so silent, so forgotten,” provide especially resonant images, including
a ghoulish scene of skulls on spikes during a thunderstorm at midnight and
a possibly spectral old couple making hay: “Gravely making hay among the
graves, all alone by themselves” (Dent 4.262; 4.265). As he wanders around
the closed banks and businesses, the Uncommercial muses on the oddness of
all those human absences, and on his “Sunday sensation... of being the Last
Man” (Dent 4.269). In “Arcadian London” (1860), the subject is London
in the off-season, when the middle classes disappear, leaving London “the
most unfrequented part of England.” A shadow city comes to light: old men
and women creep about the city carrying their beds from shelter to shelter;
they “come out of some hole when London empties itself, and go back in
again when it fills” (Dent 4.182; 4.184). The underground people include
the unprofessional sides of otherwise formidable butlers or medical assistants,
who are suddenly freed to dress casually and make love to their sweethearts.
These days of primitive innocence, as the Uncommercial calls them, repre-
sent the breakdown of pretense and relief from the noise of parliamentary
Talk lingering in the air-waves; all too soon “the wheels of gorgeous car-
riages and the hoofs of high-stepping horses will crush the silence out of
Bond Street” (Dent 4.189). Out of city silences, the Uncommercial Traveller
creates eerily unfamiliar forms of human life.
The travels of the Uncommercial include walks to the East End in “Wap-
ping Workhouse” (1860) and “On an Amateur Beat” (1869). Both pieces
highlight the difference between West and East Ends, and the increasing ten-
dency of the late-Victorian imagination to regard them as separate worlds.
“Wapping Workhouse” plays with the notion of East as Oriental, making
ironic references to the Wise Men of the East and to the Turkish frame of
mind in which the narrator allows himself to get lost in the winding streets.
“On an Amateur Beat” makes much of the invisible lines between London
neighborhoods, locating a spot—St. Botolph Church at Houndsditch—
where a single stride will make the difference: “West of the stride, a table, or
a chest of drawers on sale, shall be of mahogany and French-polished; East
of the stride, it shall be of deal, smeared with a cheap counterfeit resembling