STREETS 193landscape of Dickens’s history and of his dreams. Like a recurrent dream, the
walk is narrated as if it had been traversed on successive nights, with slight
variations in each version of the experience.
The “houseless mind” and “the houseless eye” of “Night Walks” do not
find any easy relief from insomnia in night walking. Instead Houselessness
is beset by isolation, and seeks any sign of company, any lighted place where
another consciousness might reside. Small groups of figures are conjured
up only to disappear. The city itself is a personified double figure of the
restless insomniac until it too abandons him by subsiding into sleep. The
fires or lights of guards, toll-keepers, watchmen, and turnkeys are hearten-
ing but brief flickers in the darkness as the wanderer moves from place to
place, trying to discover here a figure, there a building, that might generate
narrative. The city empties itself out into a desert region as the essay comes
to an end, and “my houselessness had many miles upon miles of streets in
which it could, and did, have its own solitary way.” The echo of Adam and
Eve at the end of Paradise Lost associates night wandering with being cast
out, or locked out of human shelter. It is a frequent association for Dickens:
the murderer Rudge suffers from feeling “more utterly alone and cast away
than in a trackless desert” as he paces the wearisome streets of London wait-
ing for dawn to break (BR 18); Little Dorrit and Maggy, locked out of the
Marshalsea, huddle or wander fearfully near its gate for the five and a half
hours before sunrise.
In the nearly deserted city, the narrator observes that drunks “appeared to
be magnetically attracted to one another; where one drunk turns up, another
is sure to follow.” According to a similar principle, the narrator is drawn to
shadowy figures like himself. A furtive head peers out of a doorway; it proves
to be attached “to a man standing bolt upright to keep within the doorway’s
shadow, and evidently intent upon no particular service to society. Under a
kind of fascination, and in a ghostly silence suitable to the time, Houselessness
and this gentleman would eye one another from head to foot, and so, with-
out exchange of speech, part, mutually suspicious.” Fascination, that telling
spellbinder, lights here upon a specular image of anti-social being, while the
mutually suspicious “eyeing” marks, as always in Dickens, the presence of an
identity recognition and exchange. This exchange bleeds into the narrator’s
next alienated self-description as “the houseless shadow” which would “fall
upon the stones that pave the way to Waterloo Bridge” where the lights on
the river look “as if the specters of suicides were holding them to show
where they went down.” At the wall of King’s Bench Prison the narrator
stops to meditate on the phenomenon of Dry Rot in men, to be observed in
those with “a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at street-corners without