192 KNOWING DICKENS
lip-salve” (Dent 4.382). Dickens is not just reifying difference here; he is
satirizing an imaginary map of a London divided into respectable and abject
halves. The satire helps to burnish the figure of the Uncommercial, whose
savvy knows no such borders: he loses himself with confidence in the East
End, and flaunts a kind of imperial knowingness as he compares his walk to
his Beat and chastises the police for fearing to enter certain dangerous streets
or courts (Dent 4.380).
The knowing narrator is also is canny enough to interpret the lingo of
an “apparition” he meets on his way to the Wapping Workhouse; this street
urchin, “who may have been the youngest son of his filthy old father, the
Thames,” informs the Uncommercial that the canal lock he’s staring into is
“Mister Baker’s trap,” from which his interlocutor derives the correct idea
that Baker is the local coroner and that it’s a common place for suicide. The
boy is tough: he says women attempt suicide only when there’s someone near
enough to hear the splash and drag them out. The Uncommercial gets credit
both for being “equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation” and
for the greater humanity of his attitudes. All of this leads up to Dickens’s
praise of the orderly, well-run Wapping workhouse that had recently been
attacked in the press (Dent 4.44). In such essays the walk to the destina-
tion provides “street cred” that reinforces the Uncommercial’s authority to
assess the institution at issue; he distinguishes himself from the middle-class
observer brought in by cab to be bamboozled by the manager of a contro-
versial workhouse or lead mill.
All of these pieces include moments in which figures are rendered uncanny
or spectral. “Night Walks” (1860) turns the dark deserted city into an inte-
rior landscape in which the walker deliberately courts spectral and specular
images (Dent 4.148–57). The narrator refers to a period of sleeplessness
and night walking during an earlier time, probably 1851, the year of John
Dickens’s painful death and the period of houseless anxiety during the tran-
sition from Devonshire Terrace to Tavistock House. In “Night Walks” the
narrator calls himself “Houselessness” and lays claim to an “amateur” kin-
ship with the homeless people of London. The walk describes an enormous
circle: starting at half-past midnight from an undesignated place, we arrive at
Waterloo Bridge, walk east past the theater district, Newgate, and the Bank
of England, turning south to Billingsgate Market, across London Bridge to
the Borough. South of the river, we walk west, stopping at the King’s Bench
Prison (close by the Marshalsea) and Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam). From
there it is an easy walk back across the river over the Westminster Bridge
to Parliament, the Courts of Law, and St. Martin’s Church, arriving back
at Covent Garden in time for an early cup of coffee. This is, of course, the