STREETS 195The direct pursuit of that unconscious in “Night Walks” comes through
in a “night-fancy” the narrator indulges as he approaches the walls of
Bethlehem Hospital. “Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as
the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream,
more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?”
The questions mix the internal with the external, the locked wards with
the city streets, the daylight writer with the manic nightwalker. Members
of every social station are leveled, too, equal in the absurdity of their dreams.
“I wonder that the great master who knew everything, when he called Sleep
the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s
sanity.” As he revises Macbeth’s account of his murder of Duncan, Dickens
suddenly comes into focus as the fulcrum between Shakespeare and Freud.
Brilliantly haunting the border between waking and dreaming, sanity and
insanity, “Night Walks” answers its fanciful questions in the affirmative.
In the end, however, Houselessness does “have its own solitary way”; he
can script his own path through the city of the night. In flight from inter-
nal trouble, the walker finds his ghosts as images in the streets, where he is
empowered to gaze, identify, and name.
With the questionable exception of the pudding-eater’s dead mother,
“Night Walks” is remarkable for presenting no female figure. It includes no
destitute women, no prostitutes threading their way through labyrinthine
courts, no girl children under threat, none of the predictable feminine
emblems of poverty, sexuality, or vulnerability that people so many of Dick-
ens’s night streets. “I knew well enough where to find Vice and Misfortune
of all kinds, if I had chosen,” asserts the narrator, “but they were put out of
sight.” His sights are set instead on figures that reflect his subjective fascina-
tions without the sentimental mediation that female surrogates can provide.
At the same time, the Uncommercial Traveller’s systematic visits to the sites of
his hidden past may put us in mind of an earlier surrogate, Lady Dedlock. From
her first appearance in the text of Bleak House, Lady Dedlock is in motion.
Her movements are uncertain; she flies between Paris, Chesney Wold, and
the house in London; when she hears news that bears on her hidden past, she
demands to get out of the carriage and walk; at home she is restless, pacing.
Once she knows that her past affair with Captain Hawdon has been exposed
to her husband, she is overcome by a panic so powerful that it shatters her usual
self-command: “Hunted, she flies. The complication of her shame, her dread,
remorse, and misery, overwhelms her at its height; and even her strength of self-
reliance is overturned and whirled away, like a leaf before a mighty wind.” That
is all the explanation we get. In her note to her husband, she renders herself
houseless: “I have no home left. I will encumber you no more” (BH 55).